olved not to go near his old home
again, but when he heard of this it was too much for him, and every
night for a week he would get on the car and ride out to the stockyards,
and help to undo his work of the previous year, when he had sent Mike
Scully's ten-pin setter to the city Board of Aldermen.

It was quite marvelous to see what a difference twelve months had
made in Packingtown--the eyes of the people were getting opened! The
Socialists were literally sweeping everything before them that election,
and Scully and the Cook County machine were at their wits' end for an
"issue." At the very close of the campaign they bethought themselves of
the fact that the strike had been broken by Negroes, and so they sent
for a South Carolina fire-eater, the "pitchfork senator," as he was
called, a man who took off his coat when he talked to workingmen,
and damned and swore like a Hessian. This meeting they advertised
extensively, and the Socialists advertised it too--with the result
that about a thousand of them were on hand that evening. The "pitchfork
senator" stood their fusillade of questions for about an hour, and then
went home in disgust, and the balance of the meeting was a strictly
party affair. Jurgis, who had insisted upon coming, had the time of
his life that night; he danced about and waved his arms in his
excitement--and at the very climax he broke loose from his friends,
and got out into the aisle, and proceeded to make a speech himself! The
senator had been denying that the Democratic party was corrupt; it
was always the Republicans who bought the votes, he said--and here was
Jurgis shouting furiously, "It's a lie! It's a lie!" After which he went
on to tell them how he knew it--that he knew it because he had bought
them himself! And he would have told the "pitchfork senator" all his
experiences, had not Harry Adams and a friend grabbed him about the neck
and shoved him into a seat.

Chapter 31

One of the first things that Jurgis had done after he got a job was to
go and see Marija. She came down into the basement of the house to meet
him, and he stood by the door with his hat in his hand, saying, "I've
got work now, and so you can leave here."

But Marija only shook her head. There was nothing else for her to
do, she said, and nobody to employ her. She could not keep her past a
secret--girls had tried it, and they were always found out. There were
thousands of men who came to this place, and sooner or la