on them. He made a living at it, but it was getting
harder all the time, because his eyes were failing.
What would come when they gave out he could not tell;
there had been no saving anything—a man
could barely keep alive by twelve or fourteen hours’
work a day. The finishing of pants did not take
much skill, and anybody could learn it, and so the
pay was forever getting less. That was the competitive
wage system; and if Jurgis wanted to understand what
Socialism was, it was there he had best begin.
The workers were dependent upon a job to exist from
day to day, and so they bid against each other, and
no man could get more than the lowest man would consent
to work for. And thus the mass of the people
were always in a life-and-death struggle with poverty.
That was “competition,” so far as it concerned
the wage-earner, the man who had only his labor to
sell; to those on top, the exploiters, it appeared
very differently, of course—there were few
of them, and they could combine and dominate, and
their power would be unbreakable. And so all
over the world two classes were forming, with an unbridged
chasm between them—the capitalist class,
with its enormous fortunes, and the proletariat, bound
into slavery by unseen chains. The latter were
a thousand to one in numbers, but they were ignorant
and helpless, and they would remain at the mercy of
their exploiters until they were organized—until
they had become “class-conscious.”
It was a slow and weary process, but it would go on—it
was like the movement of a glacier, once it was started
it could never be stopped. 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 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 of that 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. Also
he had always the progress to encourage him; here
in Chicago, for instance, the movement was growing
by leaps and bounds. Chicago was the industrial
center of the country, and nowhere else were the unions
so strong; but their organizations did the workers
little good, for the employers were organized, also;
and so the strikes generally failed, and as fast as
the unions were broken up the men were coming over
to the Socialists.
Ostrinski explained the organization of the party,
the machinery by which the proletariat was educating
itself. There were “locals” in every
big city and town, and they were being organized rapidly
in the smaller places; a local had anywhere from six
to a thousand members, and there were fourteen hundred
of them in all, with a total of about twenty-five
thousand members, who paid dues to support the organization.
“Local Cook County,” as the city organization
was called, had eighty branch locals, and it alone
was spending several thousand dollars in the campaign.
It published a weekly in English, and one each in
Bohemian and German; also there was a monthly published
in Chicago, and a cooperative publishing house, that
issued a million and a half of Socialist books and
pamphlets every year. All this was the growth
of the last few years—there had been almost
nothing of it when Ostrinski first came to Chicago.