dangerous trades will be made safe, or substitutes will be found for their products.  In exactly the same way, as the citizens of our Industrial Republic become refined, year by year the cost of slaughterhouse products will increase; until eventually those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing—­and how long do you think the custom would survive then?—­To go on to another item—­one of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption; and one of the consequences of civic administration by ignorant and vicious politicians, is that preventable diseases kill off half our population.  And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others.  They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of course, they remain as centers of contagion, poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish.  For this reason I would seriously maintain that all the medical and surgical discoveries that science can make in the future will be of less importance than the application of the knowledge we already possess, when the disinherited of the earth have established their right to a human existence.”

And here the Herr Doctor relapsed into silence again.  Jurgis had noticed that the beautiful young girl who sat by the center-table was listening with something of the same look that he himself had worn, the time when he had first discovered Socialism.  Jurgis would have liked to talk to her, he felt sure that she would have understood him.  Later on in the evening, when the group broke up, he heard Mrs. Fisher say to her, in a low voice, “I wonder if Mr. Maynard will still write the same things about Socialism”; to which she answered, “I don’t know—­but if he does we shall know that he is a knave!”

And only a few hours after this came election day—­when the long campaign was over, and the whole country seemed to stand still and hold its breath, awaiting the issue.  Jurgis and the rest of the staff of Hinds’s Hotel could hardly stop to finish their dinner, before they hurried off to the big hall which the party had hired for that evening.

But already there were people waiting, and already the telegraph instrument on the stage had begun clicking off the returns.  When the final accounts were made up, the Socialist vote proved to be over four hundred thousand—­an increase of something like three hundred and fifty per cent in four years.  And that was doing well; but the party was dependent for its early returns upon messages from the locals, and naturally those locals which had been most successful were the ones which felt most like reporting; and so that night every one in the hall believed that