The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (easy to read books for adults list TXT) 📕

associate of saloon-keepers and women of the town; who again and again, in the most explicit language, denounced wealth and the holding of wealth: ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth!’⁠—‘Sell that ye have and give alms!’⁠—‘Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of Heaven!’⁠—‘Woe unto you that are rich, for ye have received your consolation!’⁠—‘Verily, I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of Heaven!’ Who denounced in unmeasured terms the exploiters of his own time: ‘Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites!’⁠—‘Woe unto you also, you lawyers!’⁠—‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?’ Who drove out the business men and brokers from the temple with a whip! Who was crucified⁠—think of it⁠—for an incendiary and a disturber of the social order! And this man they have made into the high-priest of property and smug respectability, a divine sanction of all the horrors and abominations of modern commercial civilization! Jewelled images are made of him, sensual priests burn incense to him, and modern pirates of industry bring their dollars, wrung from the toil of helpless women and children, and build temples to him, and sit in cushioned seats and listen to his teachings expounded by doctors of dusty divinity⁠—”

“Bravo!” cried Schliemann, laughing. But the other was in full career⁠—he had talked this subject every day for five years, and had never yet let himself be stopped. “This Jesus of Nazareth!” he cried. “This class-conscious workingman! This union carpenter! This agitator, lawbreaker, firebrand, anarchist! He, the sovereign lord and master of a world which grinds the bodies and souls of human beings into dollars⁠—if he could come into the world this day and see the things that men have made in his name, would it not blast his soul with horror? Would he not go mad at the sight of it, he the Prince of Mercy and Love! That dreadful night when he lay in the Garden of Gethsemane and writhed in agony until he sweat blood⁠—do you think that he saw anything worse than he might see tonight upon the plains of Manchuria, where men march out with a jewelled image of him before them, to do wholesale murder for the benefit of foul monsters of sensuality and cruelty? Do you not know that if he were in St. Petersburg now, he would take the whip with which he drove out the bankers from his temple⁠—”

Here the speaker paused an instant for breath. “No, comrade,” said the other, dryly, “for he was a practical man. He would take pretty little imitation-lemons, such as are now being shipped into Russia, handy for carrying in the pockets, and strong enough to blow a whole temple out of sight.”

Lucas waited until the company had stopped laughing over this; then he began again: “But look at it from the point of view of practical politics, comrade. Here is an historical figure whom all men reverence and love, whom some regard as divine; and who was one of us⁠—who lived our life, and taught our doctrine. And now shall we leave him in the hands of his enemies⁠—shall we allow them to stifle and stultify his example? We have his words, which no one can deny; and shall we not quote them to the people, and prove to them what he was, and what he taught, and what he did? No, no⁠—a thousand times no!⁠—we shall use his authority to turn out the knaves and sluggards from his ministry, and we shall yet rouse the people to action!⁠—”

Lucas halted again; and the other stretched out his hand to a paper on the table. “Here, comrade,” he said, with a laugh, “here is a place for you to begin. A bishop whose wife has just been robbed of fifty thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds! And a most unctuous and oily of bishops! An eminent and scholarly bishop! A philanthropist and friend of labor bishop⁠—a Civic Federation decoy-duck for the chloroforming of the wage-workingman!”

To this little passage of arms the rest of the company sat as spectators. But now Mr. Maynard, the editor, took occasion to remark, somewhat naively, that he had always understood that Socialists had a cut-and-dried programme for the future of civilization; whereas here were two active members of the party, who, from what he could make out, were agreed about nothing at all. Would the two, for his enlightenment, try to ascertain just what they had in common, and why they belonged to the same party? This resulted, after much debating, in the formulating of two carefully worded propositions: First, that a Socialist believes in the common ownership and democratic management of the means of producing the necessities of life; and, second, that a socialist believes that the means by which this is to be brought about is the class-conscious political organization of the wage-earners. Thus far they were at one; but no farther. To Lucas, the religious zealot, the cooperative commonwealth was the New Jerusalem, the kingdom of Heaven, which is “within you.” To the other, Socialism was simply a necessary step toward a far-distant goal, a step to be tolerated with impatience. Schliemann called himself a “philosophic anarchist”; and he explained that an anarchist was one who believed that the end of human existence was the free development of every personality, unrestricted by laws save those of its own being. Since the same kind of match would light everyone’s fire and the same-shaped loaf of bread would fill everyone’s stomach, it would be perfectly feasible to submit industry to the control of a majority vote. There was only one earth, and the quantity of material things was limited. Of intellectual and moral things, on the other hand, there was no limit, and one could have more without another’s having less; hence “Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual,” was the formula of modern proletarian thought. As soon as the birth-agony was over, and the wounds of