back room of a saloon, and showed each of them where
and how to mark a ballot, and then gave each two dollars,
and took them to the polling place, where there was a
policeman on duty especially to see that they got through
all right. Jurgis felt quite proud of this good luck till
he got home and met Jonas, who had taken the leader
aside and whispered to him, offering to vote three times
for four dollars, which offer had been accepted.

And now in the union Jurgis met men who explained
all this mystery to him; and he learned that America
differed from Russia in that its government existed under
the form of a democracy. The officials who ruled it, and
got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there were
two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and
the one got the office which bought the most votes. Now
and then the election was very close, and that was the
time the poor man came in. In the stockyards this was
only in national and state elections, for in local elections
the Democratic Party always carried everything. The
ruler of the district was therefore the Democratic boss,
a little Irish man named Mike Scully. Scully held an
important party office in the state, and bossed even the
mayor of the city, it was said; it was his boast that he
carried the stockyards in his pocket. He was an enor~
mously rich man -- he had a hand in all the big graft in
the neighborhood. It was Scully, for instance, who owned
that dump which Jurgis and Ona had seen the first day
of their arrival. Not only did he own the dump, but he
owned the brick-factory as well; and first he took out the
clay and made it into bricks, and then he had the city
bring garbage to fill up the hole, so that he could build
houses to sell to the people. Then, too, he sold the bricks
to the city, at his own price, and the city came and got
them in its own wagons. And also he owned the other
hole near by, where the stagnant water was; and it was
he who cut the ice and sold it; and what was more, if the
men told truth, he had not had to pay any taxes for the
water, and he had built the ice-house out of city lumber,
and had not had to pay anything for that. The news~

[[110]]

p109 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p110w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p111

v?