to get suspicious, and content themselves with saying,
"Never mind, you stay here and see for yourself."

One of the first problems that Jurgis ran upon was that
of the unions. He had had no experience with unions,
and he had to have it explained to him that the men
were banded together for the purpose of fighting for
their rights. Jurgis asked them what they meant by
their rights, a question in which he was quite sincere, for
he had not any idea of any rights that he had, except the
right to hunt for a job, and do as he was told when he
got it. Generally, however, this harmless question would
only make his fellow-working-men lose their tempers and
call him a fool. There was a delegate of the butcher-
helpers' union who came to see Jurgis to enroll him; and
when Jurgis found that this meant that he would have to
part with some of his money, he froze up directly, and the
delegate, who was an Irish man and only knew a few words
of Lithuanian, lost his temper and began to threaten him.
In the end Jurgis got into a fine rage, and made it suffi~
ciently plain that it would take more than one Irish man
to scare him into a union. Little by little he gathered
that the main thing the men wanted was to put a stop to
the habit of "speeding-up"; they were trying their best
to force a lessening of the pace, for there were some, they
said, who could not keep up with it, whom it was killing.
But Jurgis had no sympathy with such ideas as this -- he
could do the work himself, and so could the rest of them,
he declared, if they were good for anything. If they
couldn't do it, let them go somewhere else. Jurgis had
not studied the books, and he would not have known how
to pronounce "laissez faire"; but he had been round the
world enough to know that a man has to shift for himself
in it, and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody
to listen to him holler.

Yet there have been known to be philosophers and plain
men who swore by Malthus in the books, and would, never~
theless, subscribe to a relief fund in time of a famine. It
was the same with Jurgis, who consigned the unfit to
destruction, while going about all day sick at heart

[[68]]

p067 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p068w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p069

v?