half a dozen of them in a single batch of
telegrams. And the men who read the despatches off to the audience were
old campaigners, who had been to the places and helped to make the
vote, and could make appropriate comments: Quincy, Illinois, from 189 to
831--that was where the mayor had arrested a Socialist speaker! Crawford
County, Kansas, from 285 to 1,975; that was the home of the "Appeal
to Reason"! Battle Creek, Michigan, from 4,261 to 10,184; that was the
answer of labor to the Citizens' Alliance Movement!

And then there were official returns from the various precincts and
wards of the city itself! Whether it was a factory district or one of
the "silk-stocking" wards seemed to make no particular difference in the
increase; but one of the things which surprised the party leaders
most was the tremendous vote that came rolling in from the stockyards.
Packingtown comprised three wards of the city, and the vote in the
spring of 1903 had been 500, and in the fall of the same year, 1,600.
Now, only one year later, it was over 6,300--and the Democratic vote
only 8,800! There were other wards in which the Democratic vote had
been actually surpassed, and in two districts, members of the state
legislature had been elected. Thus Chicago now led the country; it had
set a new standard for the party, it had shown the workingmen the way!

--So spoke an orator upon the platform; and two thousand pairs of eyes
were fixed upon him, and two thousand voices were cheering his every
sentence. The orator had been the head of the city's relief bureau in
the stockyards, until the sight of misery and corruption had made him
sick. He was young, hungry-looking, full of fire; and as he swung his
long arms and beat up the crowd, to Jurgis he seemed the very spirit of
the revolution. "Organize! Organize! Organize!"--that was his cry. He
was afraid of this tremendous vote, which his party had not expected,
and which it had not earned. "These men are not Socialists!" he cried.
"This election will pass, and the excitement will die, and people will
forget about it; and if you forget about it, too, if you sink back and
rest upon your oars, we shall lose this vote that we have polled to-day,
and our enemies will laugh us to scorn! It rests with you to take your
resolution--now, in the flush of victory, to find these men who have
voted for us, and bring them to our meetings, and organize them and bind
them to us! We shall not find all our campaigns a