To disgust the reader by dragging him through every conceivable horror, physical and moral, to depict with lurid excitement and with offensive minuteness the life in jail and brothel—­all this is to overreach the object....  Even things actually terrible may become distorted when a writer screams them out in a sensational way and in a high pitched key....  More convincing if it were less hysterical.

Don’t you see what these clerical crooks are for?

#The Jungle#

A four years’ war was fought in America, a million men were killed and half a continent was devastated, in order to abolish chattel slavery and put wage slavery in its place.  I have made a thorough study of both these industrial systems, and I freely admit that there is one respect in which the lot of the wage slave is better than that of the chattel slave.  The wage slave is free to think; and by squeezing a few drops of blood from his starving body, he may possess himself of machinery for the distribution of his ideas.  Taking his chances of the policeman’s club and the jail, he may found revolutionary organizations, and so he has the candle of hope to light him to his death-bed.  But excepting this consideration, and taking the circumstances of the wage slave from the material point of view alone, I hold it beyond question that the average lot of the chattel slave of 1860 was preferable to that of the modern slave of the Beef Trust, the Steel Trust, or the Coal Trust.  It was the Southern master’s real concern, his business interest, that the chattel slave should be kept physically sound; but it is nobody’s business to care anything about the wage slave.  The children of the chattel slave were valuable property, and so they got plenty to eat, and a happy outdoor life, and medical attention if they fell ill.  But the children of the sweat-shop or the cotton-mill or the canning-factory are raised in a city slum, and never know what it is to have enough to eat, never know a feeling of security or rest—­

  We are weary in our cradles
  From our mother’s toil untold;
  We are born to hoarded weariness
  As some to hoarded gold.

The system of competitive commercialism, of large-scale capitalist industry in its final flowering!  I quote from “The Jungle”: 

Here in this city tonight, ten thousand women are shut up in foul pens, and driven by hunger to sell their bodies to live.  Tonight in Chicago there are ten thousand men, homeless and wretched, willing to work and begging for a chance, yet starving, and fronting with terror the awful winter cold!  Tonight in Chicago there are a hundred thousand children wearing out their strength and blasting their lives in the effort to earn their bread!  There are a hundred thousand mothers who are living in misery and squalor, struggling to earn enough to feed their little ones!  There are a hundred thousand old people, cast off and helpless, waiting for death to take them from their torments!