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.

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