thought to them. Only the
other day I read in my paper--while we are all making sacrifices in a
"War for Democracy"--that Armour and Company had paid a dividend of
twenty-one per cent, and Swift and Company a dividend of thirty-five
per cent.

This prosperity they owe in good part to their clerical camouflage.
Listen to our pious "Outlook", engaged in countermining "The Jungle".
The "Outlook" has no doubt that there are genuine evils in the
packing-plants; the conditions of the workers ought of course to be
improved; BUT--

To disgust the reader by dragging him through every
conceivable horror, physical and moral, to depict with lurid
excitement and with offensive minuteness the life in jail
and brothel--all this is to overreach the object.... Even
things actually terrible may become distorted when a writer
screams them out in a sensational way and in a high pitched
key.... More convincing if it were less hysterical.

Don't you see what these clerical crooks are for?

#The Jungle#

A four years' war was fought in America, a million men were killed and
half a continent was devastated, in order to abolish chattel slavery
and put wage slavery in its place. I have made a thorough study of
both these industrial systems, and I freely admit that there is one
respect in which the lot of the wage slave is better than that of the
chattel slave. The wage slave is free to think; and by squeezing a few
drops of blood from his starving body, he may possess himself of
machinery for the distribution of his ideas. Taking his chances of the
policeman's club and the jail, he may found revolutionary
organizations, and so he has the candle of hope to light him to his
death-bed. But excepting this consideration, and taking the
circumstances of the wage slave from the material point of view alone,
I hold it beyond question that the average lot of the chattel slave of
1860 was preferable to that of the modern slave of the Beef Trust, the
Steel Trust, or the Coal Trust. It was the Southern master's real
concern, his business interest, that the chattel slave should be kept
physically sound; but it is nobody's business to care anything about
the wage slave. The children of the chattel slave were valuable
property, and so they got plenty to eat, and a happy outdoor life, and
medical attention if they fell ill. But the children of the sweat-shop
or the cotton-mill or the canning-factory are raised in a cit