as food at dinner-time. When they were at work they
could not even wipe off their faces -- they were as helpless
as newly born babes in that respect; and it may seem like
a small matter, but when the sweat began to run down their
necks and tickle them, or a fly to bother them, it was a tor~
ture like being burned alive. Whether it was the slaugh~
ter-houses or the dumps that were responsible, one could
not say, but with the hot weather there descended upon
Packingtown a veritable Egyptian plague of flies; there
could be no describing this -- the houses would be black
with them. There was no escaping; you might provide
all your doors and windows with screens, but their buzzing
outside would be like the swarming of bees, and whenever
you opened the door they would rush in as if a storm of
wind were driving them.

Perhaps the summer time suggests to you thoughts of
the country, visions of green fields and mountains and
sparkling lakes. It had no such suggestion for the people
in the yards. The great packing-machine ground on
remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the
men and women and children who were part of it never
saw any green thing, not even a flower. Four or five miles
to the east of them lay the blue waters of Lake Michigan;
but for all the good it did them it might have been as far
away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and
then they were too tired to walk. They were tied to the
great packing-machine, and tied to it for life. The man~
agers and superintendents and clerks of Packingtown were
all recruited from another class, and never from the
workers; they scorned the workers, the very meanest of
them. A poor devil of a bookkeeper who had been work~
ing in Durham's for twenty years at a salary of six dollars
a week, and might work there for twenty more and do no
better, would yet consider himself a gentleman, as far
removed as the poles from the most skilled worker on the
killing-beds; he would dress differently, and live in
another part of the town, and come to work at a different
hour of the day, and in every way make sure that he never
rubbed elbows with a laboring-man. Perhaps this was

[[121]]

p120 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p121w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p122

v?