on, just out of the hospital, who had hanged himself in New
York because he could not find work. It collected the stories of graft
and misery from the daily press, and made a little pungent paragraphs
out of them. "Three banks of Bungtown, South Dakota, failed, and
more savings of the workers swallowed up!" "The mayor of Sandy Creek,
Oklahoma, has skipped with a hundred thousand dollars. That's the kind
of rulers the old partyites give you!" "The president of the Florida
Flying Machine Company is in jail for bigamy. He was a prominent
opponent of Socialism, which he said would break up the home!" The
"Appeal" had what it called its "Army," about thirty thousand of the
faithful, who did things for it; and it was always exhorting the "Army"
to keep its dander up, and occasionally encouraging it with a prize
competition, for anything from a gold watch to a private yacht or an
eighty-acre farm. Its office helpers were all known to the "Army" by
quaint titles--"Inky Ike," "the Bald-headed Man," "the Redheaded Girl,"
"the Bulldog," "the Office Goat," and "the One Hoss."

But sometimes, again, the "Appeal" would be desperately serious. It sent
a correspondent to Colorado, and printed pages describing the overthrow
of American institutions in that state. In a certain city of the country
it had over forty of its "Army" in the headquarters of the Telegraph
Trust, and no message of importance to Socialists ever went through that
a copy of it did not go to the "Appeal." It would print great broadsides
during the campaign; one copy that came to Jurgis was a manifesto
addressed to striking workingmen, of which nearly a million copies had
been distributed in the industrial centers, wherever the employers'
associations had been carrying out their "open shop" program. "You have
lost the strike!" it was headed. "And now what are you going to do about
it?" It was what is called an "incendiary" appeal--it was written by a
man into whose soul the iron had entered. When this edition appeared,
twenty thousand copies were sent to the stockyards district; and they
were taken out and stowed away in the rear of a little cigar store, and
every evening, and on Sundays, the members of the Packingtown locals
would get armfuls and distribute them on the streets and in the houses.
The people of Packingtown had lost their strike, if ever a people had,
and so they read these papers gladly, and twenty thousand were hardly
enough to go round. Jurgis had res