has overshoes and an umbrella, but everybody desires in some way,
however small, to appear more important than his neighbor.

Meeting one another they spoke about the factory and the machines,
had their fling against their foreman, conversed and thought only of
matters closely and manifestly connected with their work. Only
rarely, and then but faintly, did solitary sparks of impotent
thought glimmer in the wearisome monotony of their talk. Returning
home they quarreled with their wives, and often beat them, unsparing
of their fists. The young people sat in the taverns, or enjoyed
evening parties at one another's houses, played the accordion, sang
vulgar songs devoid of beauty, danced, talked ribaldry, and drank.

Exhausted with toil, men drank swiftly, and in every heart there
awoke and grew an incomprehensible, sickly irritation. It demanded
an outlet. Clutching tenaciously at every pretext for unloading
themselves of this disquieting sensation, they fell on one another
for mere trifles, with the spiteful ferocity of beasts, breaking
into bloody quarrels which sometimes ended in serious injury and on
rare occasions even in murder.

This lurking malice steadily increased, inveterate as the incurable
weariness in their muscles. They were born with this disease of the
soul inherited from their fathers. Like a black shadow it
accompanied them to their graves, spurring on their lives to crime,
hideous in its aimless cruelty and brutality.

On holidays the young people came home late at night, dirty and
dusty, their clothes torn, their faces bruised, boasting maliciously
of the blows they had struck their companions, or the insults they