ing of the campaign, when
Jurgis heard the two standard-bearers of his party. Ten years before
there had been in Chicago a strike of a hundred and fifty thousand
railroad employees, and thugs had been hired by the railroads to commit
violence, and the President of the United States had sent in troops
to break the strike, by flinging the officers of the union into jail
without trial. The president of the union came out of his cell a ruined
man; but also he came out a Socialist; and now for just ten years he had
been traveling up and down the country, standing face to face with the
people, and pleading with them for justice. He was a man of electric
presence, tall and gaunt, with a face worn thin by struggle and
suffering. The fury of outraged manhood gleamed in it--and the tears of
suffering little children pleaded in his voice. When he spoke he paced
the stage, lithe and eager, like a panther. He leaned over, reaching out
for his audience; he pointed into their souls with an insistent finger.
His voice was husky from much speaking, but the great auditorium was as
still as death, and every one heard him.

And then, as Jurgis came out from this meeting, some one handed him
a paper which he carried home with him and read; and so he became
acquainted with the "Appeal to Reason." About twelve years previously a
Colorado real-estate speculator had made up his mind that it was wrong
to gamble in the necessities of life of human beings: and so he had
retired and begun the publication of a Socialist weekly. There had come
a time when he had to set his own type, but he had held on and won out,
and now his publication was an institution. It used a carload of paper
every week, and the mail trains would be hours loading up at the depot
of the little Kansas town. It was a four-page weekly, which sold for
less than half a cent a copy; its regular subscription list was a
quarter of a million, and it went to every crossroads post office in
America.

The "Appeal" was a "propaganda" paper. It had a manner all its own--it
was full of ginger and spice, of Western slang and hustle: It collected
news of the doings of the "plutes," and served it up for the benefit
of the "American working-mule." It would have columns of the deadly
parallel--the million dollars' worth of diamonds, or the fancy
pet-poodle establishment of a society dame, beside the fate of Mrs.
Murphy of San Francisco, who had starved to death on the streets, or of
John Robins