So Jurgis thought, and so he spoke, in his bold, free way; very much to his surprise, he found that it had a tendency to get him into trouble.  For most of the men here took a fearfully different view of the thing.  He was quite dismayed when he first began to find it out—­that most of the men hated their work.  It seemed strange, it was even terrible, when you came to find out the universality of the sentiment; but it was certainly the fact—­they hated their work.  They hated the bosses and they hated the owners; they hated the whole place, the whole neighborhood—­even the whole city, with an all-inclusive hatred, bitter and fierce.  Women and little children would fall to cursing about it; it was rotten, rotten as hell—­everything was rotten.  When Jurgis would ask them what they meant, they would begin to get suspicious, and content themselves with saying, “Never mind, you stay here and see for yourself.”

One of the first problems that Jurgis ran upon was that of the unions.  He had had no experience with unions, and he had to have it explained to him that the men were banded together for the purpose of fighting for their rights.  Jurgis asked them what they meant by their rights, a question in which he was quite sincere, for he had not any idea of any rights that he had, except the right to hunt for a job, and do as he was told when he got it.  Generally, however, this harmless question would only make his fellow workingmen lose their tempers and call him a fool.  There was a delegate of the butcher-helpers’ union who came to see Jurgis to enroll him; and when Jurgis found that this meant that he would have to part with some of his money, he froze up directly, and the delegate, who was an Irishman and only knew a few words of Lithuanian, lost his temper and began to threaten him.  In the end Jurgis got into a fine rage, and made it sufficiently plain that it would take more than one Irishman to scare him into a union.  Little by little he gathered that the main thing the men wanted was to put a stop to the habit of “speeding-up”; they were trying their best to force a lessening of the pace, for there were some, they said, who could not keep up with it, whom it was killing.  But Jurgis had no sympathy with such ideas as this—­he could do the work himself, and so could the rest of them, he declared, if they were good for anything.  If they couldn’t do it, let them go somewhere else.  Jurgis had not studied the books, and he would not have known how to pronounce “laissez faire”; but he had been round the world enough to know that a man has to shift for himself in it, and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody to listen to him holler.