of a glass of beer would buy fifty copies of a leaflet, and one could hand these out to the unregenerate, and then get drunk upon the thought of the good that was being accomplished.  That was the way the movement had been made, and it was the only way it would progress; it availed nothing to know of it, without fighting for it—­it was a thing for all, not for a few!  A corollary of this proposition of course was, that any one who refused to receive the new gospel was personally responsible for keeping Jurgis from his heart’s desire; and this, alas, made him uncomfortable as an acquaintance.  He met some neighbors with whom Elzbieta had made friends in her neighborhood, and he set out to make Socialists of them by wholesale, and several times he all but got into a fight.

It was all so painfully obvious to Jurgis!  It was so incomprehensible how a man could fail to see it!  Here were all the opportunities of the country, the land, and the buildings upon the land, the railroads, the mines, the factories, and the stores, all in the hands of a few private individuals, called capitalists, for whom the people were obliged to work for wages.  The whole balance of what the people produced went to heap up the fortunes of these capitalists, to heap, and heap again, and yet again—­and that in spite of the fact that they, and every one about them, lived in unthinkable luxury!  And was it not plain that if the people cut off the share of those who merely “owned,” the share of those who worked would be much greater?  That was as plain as two and two makes four; and it was the whole of it, absolutely the whole of it; and yet there were people who could not see it, who would argue about everything else in the world.  They would tell you that governments could not manage things as economically as private individuals; they would repeat and repeat that, and think they were saying something!  They could not see that “economical” management by masters meant simply that they, the people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid less!  They were wage-earners and servants, at the mercy of exploiters whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible; and they were taking an interest in the process, were anxious lest it should not be done thoroughly enough!  Was it not honestly a trial to listen to an argument such as that?

And yet there were things even worse.  You would begin talking to some poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six o’clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to take his clothes off; who had never had a week’s vacation in his life, had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything, never hoped anything—­and when you started to tell him about Socialism he would sniff and say, “I’m not interested in that—­I’m an individualist!” And then he would go on to tell you that Socialism was “paternalism,”