billion of animals since the founding of the plant by the elder Durham
a generation and more ago. If you counted with it the other big
plants--and they were now really all one--it was, so Jokubas informed
them, the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in
one place. It employed thirty thousand men; it supported directly two
hundred and fifty thousand people in its neighborhood, and indirectly it
supported half a million. It sent its products to every country in
the civilized world, and it furnished the food for no less than thirty
million people!

To all of these things our friends would listen openmouthed--it seemed
to them impossible of belief that anything so stupendous could have been
devised by mortal man. That was why to Jurgis it seemed almost profanity
to speak about the place as did Jokubas, skeptically; it was a thing
as tremendous as the universe--the laws and ways of its working no more
than the universe to be questioned or understood. All that a mere man
could do, it seemed to Jurgis, was to take a thing like this as he found
it, and do as he was told; to be given a place in it and a share in
its wonderful activities was a blessing to be grateful for, as one was
grateful for the sunshine and the rain. Jurgis was even glad that he had
not seen the place before meeting with his triumph, for he felt that the
size of it would have overwhelmed him. But now he had been admitted--he
was a part of it all! He had the feeling that this whole huge
establishment had taken him under its protection, and had become
responsible for his welfare. So guileless was he, and ignorant of the
nature of business, that he did not even realize that he had become an
employee of Brown's, and that Brown and Durham were supposed by all the
world to be deadly rivals--were even required to be deadly rivals by the
law of the land, and ordered to try to ruin each other under penalty of
fine and imprisonment!