failed -- if it were only by a single month -- they would
lose the house and all that they had paid on it, and then
the company would sell it over again. And did they often
get a chance to do that? _Dieve!_ (Grandmother Majaus~
zkiene raised her hands.) They did it -- how often no
one could say, but certainly more than half of the time.
They might ask any one who knew anything at all about
Packingtown as to that; she had been living here ever
since this house was built, and she could tell them all
about it. And had it ever been sold before? _Susimilkie!_
Why, since it had been built, no less than four families that
their informant could name had tried to buy it and failed.
She would tell them a little about it.

The first family had been Germans. The families had
all been of different nationalities -- there had been a repre~
sentative of several races that had displaced each other in
the stockyards. Grandmother Majauszkiene had come to
America with her son at a time when so far as she knew
there was only one other Lithuanian family in the district;
the workers had all been Germans then -- skilled cattle-
butchers that the packers had brought from abroad to
start the business. Afterward, as cheaper labor had
come, these Germans had moved away. The next were
the Irish -- there had been six or eight years when
Packingtown had been a regular Irish city. There were
a few colonies of them still here, enough to run all the
unions and the police force and get all the graft; but
the most of those who were working in the packing-
houses had gone away at the next drop in wages --
after the big strike. The Bohemians had come then, and
after them the Poles. People said that old man Durham
himself was responsible for these immigrations; he had
sworn that he would fix the people of Packingtown so
that they would never again call a strike on him, and so
he had sent his agents into every city and village in
Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and
high wages at the stockyards. The people had come in
hordes; and old Durham had squeezed them tighter and
tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces,

[[78]]

p077 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p078w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p079

v?