different light, he got at the inside of them. The pace
they set here, it was one that called for every faculty of a
man -- from the instant the first steer fell till the sound~
ing of the noon whistle, and again from half-past twelve
till heaven only knew what hour in the late afternoon or
evening, there was never one instant's rest for a man, for
his hand or his eye or his brain. Jurgis saw how they
managed it; there were portions of the work which deter~
mined the pace of the rest, and for these they had picked
men whom they paid high wages, and whom they changed
frequently. You might easily pick out these pace-makers,
for they worked under the eye of the bosses, and they
worked like men possessed. This was called "speeding
up the gang," and if any man could not keep up with the
pace, there were hundreds outside begging to try.

Yet Jurgis did not mind it; he rather enjoyed it. It
saved him the necessity of flinging his arms about and
fidgeting as he did in most work. He would laugh to
himself as he ran down the line, darting a glance now and
then at the man ahead of him. It was not the pleasantest
work one could think of, but it was necessary work; and
what more had a man the right to ask than a chance
to do something useful, and to get good pay for doing
it?

So Jurgis thought, and so he spoke, in his bold, free
way; very much to his surprise, he found that it had a
tendency to get him into trouble. For most of the men
here took a fearfully different view of the thing. He was
quite dismayed when he first began to find it out -- that
most of the men _hated_ their work. It seemed strange,
it was even terrible, when you came to find out the
universality of the sentiment; but it was certainly the
fact -- they hated their work. They hated the bosses and
they hated the owners; they hated the whole place, the
whole neighborhood -- even the whole city, with an all-
inclusive hatred, bitter and fierce. Women and little
children would fall to cursing about it; it was rotten,
rotten as hell -- everything was rotten. When Jurgis
would ask them what they meant, they would begin

[[67]]

p066 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p067w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p068

v?