the railroads--it is plundering them
day by day through the Private Car; and so the public is roused to
fury, and the papers clamor for action, and the government goes on the
war-path! And you poor common people watch and applaud the job, and
think it's all done for you, and never dream that it is really the grand
climax of the century-long battle of commercial competition--the final
death grapple between the chiefs of the Beef Trust and 'Standard Oil,'
for the prize of the mastery and ownership of the United States of
America!"

Such was the new home in which Jurgis lived and worked, and in which his
education was completed. Perhaps you would imagine that he did not do
much work there, but that would be a great mistake. He would have cut
off one hand for Tommy Hinds; and to keep Hinds's hotel a thing of
beauty was his joy in life. That he had a score of Socialist arguments
chasing through his brain in the meantime did not interfere with
this; on the contrary, Jurgis scrubbed the spittoons and polished
the banisters all the more vehemently because at the same time he was
wrestling inwardly with an imaginary recalcitrant. It would be pleasant
to record that he swore off drinking immediately, and all the rest
of his bad habits with it; but that would hardly be exact. These
revolutionists were not angels; they were men, and men who had come up
from the social pit, and with the mire of it smeared over them. Some of
them drank, and some of them swore, and some of them ate pie with their
knives; there was only one difference between them and all the rest of
the populace--that they were men with a hope, with a cause to fight
for and suffer for. There came times to Jurgis when the vision seemed
far-off and pale, and a glass of beer loomed large in comparison; but
if the glass led to another glass, and to too many glasses, he had
something to spur him to remorse and resolution on the morrow. It was
so evidently a wicked thing to spend one's pennies for drink, when the
working class was wandering in darkness, and waiting to be delivered;
the price of a glass of beer would buy fifty copies of a leaflet, and
one could hand these out to the unregenerate, and then get drunk upon
the thought of the good that was being accomplished. That was the way
the movement had been made, and it was the only way it would progress;
it availed nothing to know of it, without fighting for it--it was a
thing for all, not for a few! A corollary of th