midnight
They had put him behind bars , as if he had been a wild beast , a thing without sense or reason , without rights , without affections , without feelings . Nay , they would not even have treated a beast as they had treated him ! Would any man in his senses have trapped a wild thing in its lair , and left its young behind to die ? These midnight hours were fateful ones to Jurgis ; in them was the beginning of his rebellion , of his outlawry and his unbelief . He had no wit to trace back the social crime to its far sources -- he could not say that it was the thing men have called `` the system '' that was crushing him to the earth ; that it was the packers , his masters , who had bought up the law of the land , and had dealt out their brutal will to him from the seat of justice . He only knew that he was wronged , and that the world had wronged him ; that the law , that society , with all its powers , had declared itself his foe . And every hour his soul grew blacker , every hour he dreamed new dreams of vengeance , of defiance , of raging , frenzied hate .