s those which have in their time been
abolished and have become for us only a dreadful remembrance. The way of
human perfecting is endless, and at every moment of historical life
there are superstitions, deceits, pernicious and evil institutions
already outlived by men and belonging to the past; there are others
which appear to us in the far mists of the future; and there are some
which we are now living through and whose over-living forms the object
of our life. Such in our time is capital punishment and all punishment
in general. Such is prostitution, such is the work of militarism, war,
and such is the nearest and most obvious evil, private property in land.

[Illustration]

"THE JUNGLE."

A Recension by VERITAS.

"THE JUNGLE," a recent story by Upton Sinclair, is a nightmare of
horrors, of which the worst horror is that it is not a phantom of the
night, but claims to be true history of one phase of our
twentieth-century civilization. Nothing but the book itself could
represent its own tragic power. In my opinion it is the most terrible
book ever written.

It is for the most part a tale of the abattoirs, those unspeakable
survivals in our Christendom in which man reeks his savage and sensual
will on the lesser animals; and indirectly it is a story of the moral
abattoirs of politics, economics, society, religion and the home, where
the victims are of the species human, and where man's inhumanity to man
is as selfish and relentless as his age-long cruelty to his brothers and
sisters just behind him in the great procession.

Possibly the title is inappropriate. There is a "law of the pack," which
is observed in the genuine jungle, but these human beasts appear to have
all of the jungle's vices and few of its virtues. The author might have
called his history, "The Slaughter House," or, perhaps, plain "Hell."

It is a common saying about a packing house, "We use all of the hog
except the squeal." This author uses the squeal, or, rather, the wild
death shrieks of agony of the ten millions of living creatures tortured
to death every year in Chicago and the other tens of millions elsewhere,
to pander to the old brutal, inhuman thirst of humanity for a diet of
blood. The billions of the slain have found a voice at last, and if I
mistake not this cry of anguish from the "killing-beds" shall not sound
on until men, whose ancestors once were cannibals, shall cease to devour
even the corpses of their murdered anim