not balance a penny of profit. When Jurgis had made
himself familiar with the Socialist literature, as he would
very quickly, he would get glimpses of the Beef Trust
from all sorts of aspects, and he would find it everywhere
the same; it was the incarnation of blind and insensate
Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand
mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs; it was the
Great Butcher -- it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh.
Upon the ocean of commerce it sailed as a pirate ship; it
had hoisted the black flag and declared war upon civiliza~
tion. Bribery and corruption were its everyday methods.
In Chicago the city government was simply one of its
branch-offices; it stole billions of gallons of city water
openly, it dictated to the courts the sentences of disorderly
strikers, it forbade the mayor to enforce the building laws
against it. In the national capital it had power to prevent
inspection of its product, and to falsify government
reports; it violated the rebate laws, and when an investi~
gation was threatened it burned its books and sent its
criminal agents out of the country. In the commercial
world it was a Juggernaut car; it wiped out thousands of
businesses every year, it drove men to madness and suicide.
It had forced the price of cattle so low as to destroy the
stock-raising industry, an occupation upon which whole
states existed; it had ruined thousands of butchers who
had refused to handle its products. It divided the coun~
try into districts, and fixed the price of meat in all of
them; and it owned all the refrigerator cars, and levied an
enormous tribute upon all poultry and eggs and fruit and
vegetables. With the millions of dollars a week that
poured in upon it, it was reaching out for the control of
other interests, railroads and trolley lines, gas and electric
light franchises -- it already owned the leather and the
grain business of the country. The people were tremen~
dously stirred up over its encroachments, but nobody had
any remedy to suggest; it was the task of Socialists to
teach and organize them, and prepare them for the time
when they were to seize the huge machine called the Beef
Trust, and use it to produce food for human beings and

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