Yet there have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore by Malthus in the books, and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief fund in time of a famine.  It was the same with Jurgis, who consigned the unfit to destruction, while going about all day sick at heart because of his poor old father, who was wandering somewhere in the yards begging for a chance to earn his bread.  Old Antanas had been a worker ever since he was a child; he had run away from home when he was twelve, because his father beat him for trying to learn to read.  And he was a faithful man, too; he was a man you might leave alone for a month, if only you had made him understand what you wanted him to do in the meantime.  And now here he was, worn out in soul and body, and with no more place in the world than a sick dog.  He had his home, as it happened, and some one who would care for him it he never got a job; but his son could not help thinking, suppose this had not been the case.  Antanas Rudkus had been into every building in Packingtown by this time, and into nearly every room; he had stood mornings among the crowd of applicants till the very policemen had come to know his face and to tell him to go home and give it up.  He had been likewise to all the stores and saloons for a mile about, begging for some little thing to do; and everywhere they had ordered him out, sometimes with curses, and not once even stopping to ask him a question.

So, after all, there was a crack in the fine structure of Jurgis’ faith in things as they are.  The crack was wide while Dede Antanas was hunting a job—­and it was yet wider when he finally got it.  For one evening the old man came home in a great state of excitement, with the tale that he had been approached by a man in one of the corridors of the pickle rooms of Durham’s, and asked what he would pay to get a job.  He had not known what to make of this at first; but the man had gone on with matter-of-fact frankness to say that he could get him a job, provided that he were willing to pay one-third of his wages for it.  Was he a boss?  Antanas had asked; to which the man had replied that that was nobody’s business, but that he could do what he said.

Jurgis had made some friends by this time, and he sought one of them and asked what this meant.  The friend, who was named Tamoszius Kuszleika, was a sharp little man who folded hides on the killing beds, and he listened to what Jurgis had to say without seeming at all surprised.  They were common enough, he said, such cases of petty graft.  It was simply some boss who proposed to add a little to his income.  After Jurgis had been there awhile he would know that the plants were simply honeycombed with rottenness of that sort—­the bosses grafted off the men, and they grafted off each other; and some day the superintendent would find out about the boss, and then he would graft off the boss.  Warming to the subject, Tamoszius went on to explain the situation.