Our inherent cruelty is best illustrated in the treatment we give those who are absolutely in our power—little children and the dumb animals. With what authority do we elicit respect and obedience from our little people! With rod in hand and with venomous tongues we begin the process of subjugating and civilizing our little free, emotional people. In the name of "their highest good" do we mould them to be actors, that they may properly enact the tragedy of life as we had enacted it before them!
The dumb animals receive the cream of our refined cruelty. In order to appear civilized, we drive in carriages pulled by horses whose spinal columns have been docked, whose necks are held stiff by tight check reins, whose eyes are blinded by "fashionable" devices.
There used to be cannibalism and human sacrifices; there used to be religious prostitution and the murder of weak children and of girls; there used to be bloody revenge and the slaughter of whole populations, judicial tortures, quarterings, burnings at the stake, the lash, and slavery, which have disappeared. But if we have outlived these dreadful customs and institutions, this does not prove that there do not exist institutions and customs amongst us which have become as abhorrent to enlightened reason and conscience as those which have in their time been abolished and have become for us only a dreadful remembrance. The way of human perfecting is endless, and at every moment of historical life there are superstitions, deceits, pernicious and evil institutions already outlived by men and belonging to the past; there are others which appear to us in the far mists of the future; and there are some which we are now living through and whose over-living forms the object of our life. Such in our time is capital punishment and all punishment in general. Such is prostitution, such is the work of militarism, war, and such is the nearest and most obvious evil, private property in land.
"THE JUNGLE."
A Recension by Veritas.
"THE JUNGLE," a recent story by Upton Sinclair, is a nightmare of horrors, of which the worst horror is that it is not a phantom of the night, but claims to be true history of one phase of our twentieth-century civilization. Nothing but the book itself could represent its own tragic power. In my opinion it is the most terrible book ever written.
It is for the most part a tale of the abattoirs, those unspeakable survivals in our Christendom in which man reeks his savage and sensual will on the lesser animals; and indirectly it is a story of the moral abattoirs of politics, economics, society, religion and the home, where the victims are of the species human, and where man's inhumanity to man is as selfish and relentless as his age-long cruelty to his brothers and sisters just behind him in the great procession.
Possibly the title is inappropriate. There is a "law of the pack," which is observed in the genuine jungle, but these human beasts appear to have all of the jungle's vices and few of its virtues. The author might have called his history, "The Slaughter House," or, perhaps, plain "Hell."
It is a common saying about a packing house, "We use all of the hog except the squeal." This author uses the squeal, or, rather, the wild death shrieks of agony of the ten millions of living creatures tortured to death every year in Chicago and the other tens of millions elsewhere, to pander to the old brutal, inhuman thirst of humanity for a diet of blood. The billions of the slain have found a voice at last, and if I mistake not this cry of anguish from the "killing-beds" shall not sound on until men, whose ancestors once were cannibals, shall cease to devour even the corpses of their murdered animal relatives. But while "The Jungle" will undoubtedly make more vegetarians, it would take more than the practice of universal vegetarianism to cause the book to fulfil its mission; for this is a story of Civilization's Inferno and of the crisis of the world, a recital of conditions for which, when once comprehended, there can be no remedy but the revolution of revolutions, the event toward which the ages ran, the establishment of a genuine political, industrial and social democracy.[2]
