Every Socialist did his share, and lived upon the vision of the “good time coming”—when the working-class should go to the polls and seize the powers of government, and put an end to the private property in the means of production. No matter how poor a man was, or how much he suffered, he could never be really unhappy while he knew that of the future; even if he did not live to see it himself, his children would, and, to a Socialist, the victory of his class was his victory.
Such was the new home in which Jurgis lived and worked, and in which his education was completed. Perhaps 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.
Since his life had been caught up into the current of this great stream, things which had before been the whole of life to him came to seem of relatively slight importance; his interests were elsewhere, in the world of ideas. His outward life was commonplace and uninteresting; he was just a hotel-porter, and expected to remain one while he lived; but meantime, in the realm of thought, his life was a perpetual adventure. There was so much to know—so many wonders to be discovered!
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