dow, into which they crowded seven hundred men, sleep~
ing upon the bare springs of cots, and with a second shift
to use them by day. And when the clamor of the public
led to an investigation into these conditions, and the mayor
of the city was forced to order the enforcement of the law,
the packers got a judge to issue an injunction forbidding
him to do it!

Just at this time the mayor was boasting that he had
put an end to gambling and prize-fighting in the city;
but here a swarm of professional gamblers had leagued
themselves with the police to fleece the strike-breakers;
and any night, in the big open space in front of Brown's,
one might see brawny Negroes stripped to the waist and
pounding each other for money, while a howling throng
of three or four thousand surged about, men and women,
young white girls from the country rubbing elbows with
big buck Negroes with daggers in their boots, while rows
of woolly heads peered down from every window of the
surrounding factories. The ancestors of these black people
had been savages in Africa; and since then they had been
chattel slaves, or had been held down by a community
ruled by the traditions of slavery. Now for the first time
they were free, -- free to gratify every passion, free to
wreck themselves. They were wanted to break a strike,
and when it was broken they would be shipped away, and
their present masters would never see them again; and so
whisky and women were brought in by the car-load and
sold to them, and hell was let loose in the yards. Every
night there were stabbings and shootings; it was said that
the packers had blank permits, which enabled them to ship
dead bodies from the city without troubling the authori~
ties. They lodged men and women on the same floor; and
with the night there began a saturnalia of debauchery --
scenes such as never before had been witnessed in America.
And as the women were the dregs from the brothels of
Chicago, and the men were for the most part ignorant
country Negroes, the nameless diseases of vice were soon
rife; and this where food was being handled which was
sent out to every corner of the civilized world.

[[327]]

p326 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p327w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p328

v?