It had no such
suggestion for the people in the yards. The great packing machine ground
on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the men and
women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing, not
even a flower. Four or five miles to the east of them lay the blue
waters of Lake Michigan; but for all the good it did them it might have
been as far away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and
then they were too tired to walk. They were tied to the great packing
machine, and tied to it for life. The managers and superintendents and
clerks of Packingtown were all recruited from another class, and never
from the workers; they scorned the workers, the very meanest of them. A
poor devil of a bookkeeper who had been working in Durham's for twenty
years at a salary of six dollars a week, and might work there for twenty
more and do no better, would yet consider himself a gentleman, as far
removed as the poles from the most skilled worker on the killing beds;
he would dress differently, and live in another part of the town, and
come to work at a different hour of the day, and in every way make sure
that he never rubbed elbows with a laboring man. Perhaps this was due to
the repulsiveness of the work; at any rate, the people who worked with
their hands were a class apart, and were made to feel it.

In the late spring the canning factory started up again, and so once
more Marija was heard to sing, and the love-music of Tamoszius took on
a less melancholy tone. It was not for long, however; for a month or two
later a dreadful calamity fell upon Marija. Just one year and three days
after she had begun work as a can-painter, she lost her job.

It was a long story. Marija insisted that it was because of her activity
in the union. The packers, of course, had spies in all the unions, and
in addition they made a practice of buying up a certain number of the
union officials, as many as they thought they needed. So every week they
received reports as to what was going on, and often they knew things
before the members of the union knew them. Any one who was considered
to be dangerous by them would find that he was not a favorite with
his boss; and Marija had been a great hand for going after the foreign
people and preaching to them. However that might be, the known facts
were that a few weeks before the factory closed, Marija had been cheated
out of her pay for three hundred cans. The girls worked at a lo