The Jungle

by Upton Sinclair

Dr. Winslow seems to think that the first dollar is a male dollar, and the second a female dollar, and that when the man puts them into the bank together they reproduce nickels and dimes, which by and by grow up to be dollars as big as their daddy! He doesn’t understand that the thing he calls interest is wealth produced by another man and which the other man had taken from him!” And then the hotel-keeper went on to show how a person who could get ten thousand dollars, whether it was by saving it or stealing it, had an able-bodied man to work for him for the rest of his life. Day or night, that man would never stop; he would work in spite of sickness, of summer’s heat or winter’s cold, a blind and helpless slave of the owner of the ten thousand dollars! And there were tens upon tens of billions of such dollars—and those who were their slaves and worked for them were the wage-earners of the world!