What are the matters on which Mr. Sinclair reports? First, and most fully, the great Chicago Meat Trusts. “We use everything of the hog but its squeal,” is the only jest ever heard in the stock-yards, the places where hundreds of thousands of animals are turned every day into meat; a bitter jest and a true word. We prefer not to dwell on the sickening details supplied. Let those who wish turn to Mr. Sinclair’s pages to learn of what indescribable filth the food is made which is sold far and wide over Europe and America; but we would warn any reader who may turn to these pages in search of sensation alone that what he finds will probably disagree with him. Only a serious purpose or an unusually degraded taste can make the study of such things endurable. Of Mr. Sinclair’s serious purpose there can be, we are convinced, no question. For he does not stop short at the matter of “clean food.” He has a wider cause to serve. The nausea that results from reading his account of the processes of manufacture is only supplementary to the indignation that comes of considering the lives of the men, the women, and the children who are tortured in this Inferno. Slavery is too kind a word for their state. It is not merely that, to make a pittance they must work harder than human strength can bear, must spend so many hours every day doing one thing over and over again at the highest speed that they are too tired when work is over to preserve the decencies of human beings. Every single department of the work they have to do is always degrading and either dangerous or bound to result in some horrible disease. There are branches of the work which bring certain death in five years. Once more we are compelled to refrain from dwelling on the facts Mr. Sinclair has to tell. They are worse than anything we have read of “phossy jaw.” And outside the factory there are thieving house agents to rob the ignorant immigrant, saloons to entice him in and poison him, and a system of police and politics which either grinds him in a mill of callous injustice or robs him of his self-respect by making him its tool. Mr. Sinclair drags his poor Lithuanian, a brave and honest fellow at heart, through all the mire; shows his wife forced to sacrifice her very honour in order to get work, and dying after all of poverty and neglect; shows his only son killed through municipal carelessness and corruption. Rudkus falls from good work to bad, from bad to none; from self-respect to crime, from health to disease; but after roaching the lowest depths he is raised again and filled with a new hope and a new reason for endeavour, the doctrine of Socialism. The book ends with a manifesto of the aims and hopes of Socialism. But the close cannot—it is not intended to—take away the taste of what went before. Seldom, we believe, if ever, has so hideous a state of things been exposed so fearlessly and so thoroughly. Buried in a Blue-book, the revelation might have passed unnoticed; published in this form, it will be recognized far and wide for what it is—a most important sociological document; and the practical effect of it should be great.

Of so much of the book as has any serious significance, the truth or falsity is at least ascertainable. It purports to be a plain, straightforward statement of the lives of workers in the Chicago packing houses, and of the methods by which those enterprises flourish. It is not a pretty story. Those amateur critics who have amused themselves and bored others by taking Mrs. Wharton to task for uncovering plague spots in the body of “high society” ought to find in Mr. Sinclair’s book an occupation for many days and nights. It would be unfair to the book to cite only a few of the least offensive details of the “exposé.” Their effect is cumulative, and simple justice to Mr. Sinclair demands that you read him at first hand—so long as you can stomach him. Here is our first thorough-going American disciple, on one side at least, of Zola: a novelist with little of the insight and imagination the Frenchman possessed at his best, but with all his industry and no little of his ingenuity in gaining an effect by piling detail on detail, directing attention so persistently to parts that the whole loses all perspective.

There is too much of it to be wholly true. Undoubtedly the impression that persists is that the horrors of the life are exaggerated, that the catalogue of crimes laid at the door of the packers is carried beyond the limits of mere strict, prosaic justice. But another impression remains with equal persistence: that even with very liberal allowances made for the prejudiced statements of a partisan observer, the conditions here described are intolerable, a disgrace to everyone who contributes, directly or indirectly, to their perpetuation.

This, of course, provided the indictment is substantially true. In the end it must be accepted as such or thoroughly, searchingly explained. For the present opinion must rest mainly on internal evidence. And the evidence would be more conclusive if the author had been less ambitious. So long as Mr. Sinclair writes about the stock-yards it is difficult to escape the conviction that he has informed himself of his subject; when he betakes himself to other scenes, and attempts to let his characters breathe the air of a more familiar life, it is impossible not to recognize his ignorance. About the middle of the book the leading character, a young Lithuanian, runs away from the hopeless struggle for existence in the stock-yards. In turn he becomes “hobo,” thief, political “heeler,” strikebreaker and street beggar. Whether or not with intention on the part of the author, the emphasis shifts from milieu to character; it is no longer the story of the stock-yards, but the story of Jurgis Rudkus. Nor is it any longer Zolaesque, in spite of a delusion to that effect apparently existent in the mind of the author. A mere fondness for speaking of rather disgusting matters, and particularly for discussing the most sordid facts concerning prostitution in extremely plain terms, scarcely entitles an author to a place beside the French exponent of naturalism. No, Mr. Sinclair’s most obvious literary affinity here is the gentleman who once wrote a book entitled “If Christ Came to Chicago.”

Yet all of Mr. Sinclair’s plain speaking would be justified and even welcomed if it signified anything. Unfortunately it all comes to naught. We do not need to be told that thievery, and prostitution, and political jobbery, and economic slavery exist in Chicago. So long as these truths are before us only as abstractions they are meaningless. Mr. Sinclair has pretended to reduce them to concrete experience, but the pretence is too shallow. His chief character is a mere puppet. He is too obviously manipulated, his experiences are too palpably made to order, to signify anything one way or the other. Jurgis Rudkus is neither individual nor type. He is a mere jumble of impossible qualities labelled a man, and put through certain jerky motions at the hands of an author with a theory to prove. The whole performance shows how much Mr. Sinclair has yet to learn. And the worst of it is that his large ignorance of life throws doubt even on his competence as an observer and recorder of conditions in a special field.

And after all this there is yet a third section of the book—happily a brief one—which adds the crowning touch of unreality. Probably the author would describe it as the third period in the life of Jurgis Rudkus. The young man strays into a Socialist mass meeting one night and hears one of their great orators. He “gets Socialism” exactly as a backsliding brother in a Methodist camp meeting “gets religion,” and the effect is equally revolutionary as to character. At last the true purpose of the book comes to light. Unlike Mr. Lawson of Boston, Mr. Sinclair gives his “expose” and his remedy in a single volume. For forty or fifty pages he discourses of Socialism as the social panacea, and quotes statistics of the voting strength of political parties to show how near the millennium is. It is impossible to withhold admiration of Mr. Sinclair’s enthusiasm; and yet many socialists will regret his mistaken advocacy of their cause. His reasoning is so false, his disregard of human nature so naive, his statement of facts so biassed, his conclusions so perverted, that the effect can be only to disgust many honest, sensible folk with the very terms he uses so glibly. It is a misfortune that a book which displays genuine talent, and which is likely to be widely read, should contain so much error to nullify the effect of its merits.

Whether this improvement over earlier work be the result of writing under high excitement, whether it be as a campaign orator that Mr. Sinclair has gained such heat and motion, rather than as a novelist, cannot be decided now, particularly as the constructive, socialistic ending is exactly as weak and ineffective as any ordinary prospectus of a land company.

“The Co-operative Commonwealth is a universal automatic insurance company and savings bank for all its members. Capital being the property of all, injury to it is shared by all and made up by all. The bank is the universal government credit account;”—and so on for many pages whose flatness suggests a different hand from the brilliant opening chapter, with its vigorous description of the Lithuanian marriage feast.

To judge The Jungle fairly, it should be analyzed, first, as the work of an enthusiast absorbed in a special issue; next, as a novel which, though its realistic side might be the work of any able journalist, on the side of imagination shows qualities which can only belong to the born story-teller. And lastly, it must be confessed that in many places the effect is gained by revelling in ugliness, by lacerating the nerves so that a great tragic impression is obscured by foul-smelling detail.