It appeared as if the whole world was one elaborate system, opposed to justice and kindness, and set to making cruelty and pain. - Upton Sinclair

Jurgis had come there, and thought he was going to make himself useful, and rise and become a skilled man; but he would soon find out his error — for nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good work. You could lay that down for a rule — if you met a man who was rising in Packingtown, you met a knave.

Surely it is moderate to say that the dish-washing for a family of five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a day’s work, it takes, therefore, half a million able bodied persons — - mostly women — - to do the dish-washing of the country. And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work: that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper: of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children — - for all of which things the community has naturally to pay.

They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.