If the story be dramatized and Mrs. Fiske take the part of Ona, her presentation will make Tess seem like a pastoral idyll in comparison.
The book is great even from a political standpoint.
But more than this, it is a great moral appeal. Not in Victor Hugo or Charles Dickens does the moral passion burn with purer or intenser light than in these pages.
I should not advise children or very delicately constituted women to read it.
I have said it is a book of horrors. I started to mark the passages of peculiar tragedy and found that I was marking every page, and yet it is a justifiable book and a necessary book.
The author tells as facts the story of "diseased meat," and worse, the preparation in the night time of the bodies of the cattle which have died from known and unknown causes before reaching the slaughter pens, and the distribution of the effects, with the rest of the intentional killing of the day; he describes the preparation of "embalmed beef" from cattle covered with boils; he even narrates the story of "men who fell into the vats," and "sometimes they would be overlooked for days till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard"; he writes of the making of smoked sausage out of waste potatoes by the use of chemicals and out of spoiled meat as well; and he further speaks of rats which were "nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shovelled into carts and the man who did the shovelling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things which went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit."
But the worst of the story is a tale of the condition of the workers at Packingtown and elsewhere. It is the story of strong men who justly hated their work; of men, for no fault of their own, cast out in middle life to die; of weeping children driven with whips to their ignoble toil; of disease-producing conditions in winter, only surpassed by the deadly summer; of people working with their feet upon the ice and their heads enveloped in hot steam; of the perpetual stench which infests their nostrils, the sores which universally covered their bodies; of the terrible pace set by the continual "speeding up" of the pace makers, goaded to a pitch of frenzy; of accidents commonplace in every family; of the garbage pile of refuse from the tables of more fortunate citizens, from which many were forced to satisfy their hunger; of the terrors of the black list, the shut-down, the strike and the lockout; and of the universal swindle, whether a man bought a house, or doctored tea, coffee, sugar or flour.
It is still further a story of the moral enormities and monstrosities of the almost universal graft, "the plants honeycombed with rottenness. The bosses grafted off the men and they grafted off each other, and some day the superintendent would find out about the boss, and then he would graft off the boss."
When the men were set to perform some peculiarly immoral act, they would say, "Now we are working for the church," referring to the benefactions of the proprietors to religious institutions.
It tells the story of the training of the children in vice, of girls forced into immorality, so that a girl without virtue would stand a better chance than a decent one. It is a tale of the terrible ending of old Antanas by saltpeter poisoning; of Jonas, no one knows how, possibly he fell into the vats; of little Kristoforas by convulsions; of little Antanas by falling into a pit before the door of his house; of Marija, in a house of shame; of Stanislovas, who was eaten by rats; and of beautiful little Ona, to the description of whose ending no other than the author's pen could do justice.
