haps you would imagine that he did not do much work
there, but that would be a great mistake. He would have
cut off one hand for Tommy Hinds; and to keep Hinds's
hotel a thing of beauty was his joy in life. That he had a
score of Socialist arguments chasing through his brain in
the meantime did not interfere with this; on the contrary,
Jurgis scrubbed the spittoons and polished the banisters all
the more vehemently because at the same time he was
wrestling inwardly with an imaginary recalcitrant. It
would be pleasant to record that he swore off drinking
immediately, and all the rest of his bad habits with it; but
that would hardly be exact. These revolutionists were
not angels; they were men, and men who had come up
from the social pit, and with the mire of it smeared over
them. Some of them drank, and some of them swore, and
some of them ate pie with their knives; there was only one
difference between them and all the rest of the populace --
that they were men with a hope, with a cause to fight for
and suffer for. There came times to Jurgis when the vision
seemed far-off and pale, and a glass of beer loomed large in
comparison; but if the glass led to another glass, and to too
many glasses, he had something to spur him to remorse and
resolution on the morrow. It was so evidently a wicked
thing to spend one's pennies for drink, when the working-
class was wandering in darkness, and waiting to be de~
livered; the price of a glass of beer would buy fifty copies
of a leaflet, and one could hand these out to the unregener~
ate, and then get drunk upon the thought of the good that
was being accomplished. That was the way the movement
had been made, and it was the only way it would progress;
it availed nothing to know of it, without fighting for it --
it was a thing for all, not for a few! A corollary of this
proposition of course was, that any one who refused to re~
ceive the new gospel was personally responsible for keep~
ing Jurgis from his heart's desire; and this, alas, made
him uncomfortable as an acquaintance. He met some
neighbors with whom Elzbieta had made friends in her
neighborhood, and he set out to make Socialists of them
by wholesale, and several times he all but got into a fight.

[[386]]

p385 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p386w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p387

v?