and meat is obviously more difficult to produce than
vegetable food, less pleasant to prepare and handle, and more likely
to be unclean. But what of that, so long as it tickles the palate more
strongly?"

"How would Socialism change that?" asked the girl-student, quickly. It
was the first time she had spoken.

"So long as we have wage slavery," answered Schliemann, "it matters not
in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to
find people to perform it. But just as soon as labor is set free, then
the price of such work will begin to rise. So one by one the old, dingy,
and unsanitary factories will come down--it will be cheaper to build
new; and so the steamships will be provided with stoking machinery, and
so the dangerous trades will be made safe, or substitutes will be found
for their products. In exactly the same way, as the citizens of
our Industrial Republic become refined, year by year the cost of
slaughterhouse products will increase; until eventually those who want
to eat meat will have to do their own killing--and how long do you think
the custom would survive then?--To go on to another item--one of the
necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political
corruption; and one of the consequences of civic administration by
ignorant and vicious politicians, is that preventable diseases kill off
half our population. And even if science were allowed to try, it could
do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings
at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others. They
are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and
the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors
in the world could heal them; and so, of course, they remain as centers
of contagion, poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness
impossible for even the most selfish. For this reason I would seriously
maintain that all the medical and surgical discoveries that science can
make in the future will be of less importance than the application of
the knowledge we already possess, when the disinherited of the earth
have established their right to a human existence."

And here the Herr Doctor relapsed into silence again. Jurgis had noticed
that the beautiful young girl who sat by the center-table was listening
with something of the same look that he himself had worn, the time when
he had first discovered Socialism. Jurgis would ha