Important Quotations Explained
1. Here
was a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on
the verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of
life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as
the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances immorality
was exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it was under the
system of chattel slavery. Things that were quite unspeakable went
on there in the packing houses all the time, and were taken for granted
by everybody; only they did not show, as in the old slavery times,
because there was no difference in color between master and slave.
2. [T]he
meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling
would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were
things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned
rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before
they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them
in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were
the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and
all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be
dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the
system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some
jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these
was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did
it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale
water—and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped
into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast.
3. They
put him in a place where the snow could not beat in, where the cold
could not eat through his bones; they brought him food and drink—why,
in the name of heaven, if they must punish him, did they not put
his family in jail and leave him outside—why could they find no
better way to punish him than to leave three weak women and six
helpless children to starve and freeze?
4. All
day long the blazing midsummer sun beat down upon that square mile
of abominations: upon tens of thousands of cattle crowded into pens
whose wooden floors stank and steamed contagion; upon bare, blistering,
cinder-strewn railroad tracks, and huge blocks of dingy meat factories, whose
labyrinthine passages defied a breath of fresh air to penetrate
them; and there were not merely rivers of hot blood, and carloads
of moist flesh, and rendering vats and soap caldrons, glue factories
and fertilizer tanks, that smelt like the craters of hell—there
were also tons of garbage festering in the sun, and the greasy laundry
of the workers hung out to dry, and dining rooms littered with food
and black with flies, and toilet rooms that were open sewers.
5. To
Jurgis the packers had been equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed
him that they were the Beef Trust. They were a gigantic combination
of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the
laws of the land, and was preying upon the people.
