The Jungle

by Upton Sinclair

this music is their music, music of home. It stretches out its arms to them, they have only to give themselves up. Chicago and its saloons and its slums fade away--there are green meadows and sunlit rivers, mighty forests and snowclad hills. They behold home landscapes and childhood scenes returning; old loves and friendships begin to waken, old joys and griefs to laugh and weep.

As she roars her song, in a voice of which it is enough to say that it leaves no portion of the room vacant,

They must not give up what was right for a little money--if they did, the money would never do them any good, they could depend upon that.

one--there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.

Meantime, too, they had something to think about while they worked,--they had the memory of the last time they had been drunk, and the hope of the time when they would be drunk again.

as if he had all these complaints to show what a prodigy of health he was.

The vilest deeds, like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there; Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, And the Warder is Despair.

Oscar Wilde

I know not whether Laws be right, Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong. And they do well to hide their hell, For in it things are done That Son of God nor son of Man Ever should look upon!

In the Bridewell Jurgis met few who had been there the last time, but he met scores of others, old and young, of exactly the same sort. It was like breakers upon a beach; there was new water, but the wave looked just the same.

prophet of the new dispensation.

And what was the use, he asked, of confusing Religion with men's perversions of it?

Since the same kind of match would light every one's fire and the same-shaped loaf of bread would fill every one's stomach, it would be perfectly feasible to submit industry to the control of a majority vote. There was only one earth, and the quantity of material things was limited. Of intellectual and moral things, on the other hand, there was no limit, and one could have more without another's having less;

And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others.

For this reason I would seriously maintain that all the medical and surgical discoveries that science can make in the future will be of less importance than the application of the knowledge we already possess,