d then there was the strike, with seventy
thousand men and women all over the country idle for a couple of
months--twenty thousand in Chicago, and many of them now seeking work
throughout the city. It did not remedy matters that a few days later the
strike was given up and about half the strikers went back to work; for
every one taken on, there was a "scab" who gave up and fled. The ten
or fifteen thousand "green" Negroes, foreigners, and criminals were now
being turned loose to shift for themselves. Everywhere Jurgis went he
kept meeting them, and he was in an agony of fear lest some one of them
should know that he was "wanted." He would have left Chicago, only by
the time he had realized his danger he was almost penniless; and it
would be better to go to jail than to be caught out in the country in
the winter time.

At the end of about ten days Jurgis had only a few pennies left; and he
had not yet found a job--not even a day's work at anything, not a chance
to carry a satchel. Once again, as when he had come out of the hospital,
he was bound hand and foot, and facing the grisly phantom of starvation.
Raw, naked terror possessed him, a maddening passion that would never
leave him, and that wore him down more quickly than the actual want of
food. He was going to die of hunger! The fiend reached out its scaly
arms for him--it touched him, its breath came into his face; and he
would cry out for the awfulness of it, he would wake up in the night,
shuddering, and bathed in perspiration, and start up and flee. He would
walk, begging for work, until he was exhausted; he could not remain
still--he would wander on, gaunt and haggard, gazing about him with
restless eyes. Everywhere he went, from one end of the vast city to the
other, there were hundreds of others like him; everywhere was the sight
of plenty and the merciless hand of authority waving them away. There is
one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that
he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are
behind the bars, and the man is outside.

When he was down to his last quarter, Jurgis learned that before the
bakeshops closed at night they sold out what was left at half price, and
after that he would go and get two loaves of stale bread for a nickel,
and break them up and stuff his pockets with them, munching a bit from
time to time. He would not spend a penny save for this; and, after two
or three days more, he even beca