Noisy laughing acceptances followed and one big Guisely weaver said, “He’d come too, and see that Israel played a straight game for once in his life.”
“I’m obliged to thee, Guisely,” answered Bradley, “I hope thou’lt come. Now then, lads, I hev to speak to you about business, and if you think what I say is right, go and do what I say, do it boldly; and if you aren’t sure, then let it alone:—till you are driven to it. I am told that varry few of the men here present iver saw a power loom. And yet you mostly think ill o’ it. That isn’t a bit Yorkshire. You treat a man as you find him, you ought to do the same to a machine, that is almost a man in intelligence—that is the most perfect bit of beauty and contrivance that man iver made since man himsen was fitted wi’ fingers and thumbs by the Great Machinist of heaven and earth.”
“What is it fashioned like, Bradley?”
“It is an exceedingly compact machine and takes up little room. It is easily worked and it performs every weaving operation with neatness and perfection. It makes one hundred and seventy picks a minute or six pieces of goods in a week—you know it was full work and hard work to make one piece a week with the home loom, even for a strong man. It is made mostly of shining metal, and it is a perfect darling. Why-a! the lads and lassies in Bradley mill call their looms after their sweethearts, or husbands, or wives, and I wouldn’t wonder if they said many a sweet or snappy word to the looms that would niver be ventured on with the real Bessie or the real Joe.
“Think of your old cumbersome wooden looms, so hard and heavy and dreary to work, that it wasn’t fit or right to put a woman down to one. Then go and try a power loom, and when you hev done a day’s work on it, praise God and be thankful! I tell you God saw the millions coming whom Yorkshire and Lancashire would hev to clothe, and He gave His servant the grave, gentle, middle-aged preacher Edmund Cartwright, the model of a loom fit for God’s working men and women to use. I tell you men the power loom is one of God’s latest Gospels. We are spelling yet, with some difficulty, its first good news, but the whole world will yet thank God for the power loom!”
Here the preacher on the platform said a fervent “Thank God!” But the audience was not yet sure enough for what they were to thank God, and the few echoes to the preacher’s invitation were strangely uncertain for a Yorkshire congregation. A few of the Annis weavers compromised on a solemn “Amen!” All, however, noticed that the squire remained silent, and they were “not going”—as Lot Clarke said afterwards—“to push themsens before t’ squire.”
Then Jonathan Hartley stepped into the interval, and addressing Bradley said, “Tha calls this wonderful loom a power-loom. I’ll warrant the power comes from a steam engine.”
“Thou art right, Jonathan. I wish tha could see the wonderful engine at Dalby’s Mill in Pine Hollow. The marvelous creature stands in its big stone stable like a huge image of Destiny. It is never still, but never restless, nothing rough; calm and steady like the waves of the full sea at Scarboro’. It is the nervous center, the life, I might say, of all going on in that big building above it. It moves all the machinery, it gives life to the devil, * and speeds every shuttle in every loom.”
* The devil, a machine containing a revolving cylinder armed
with knives or spikes for tearing, cutting, or opening raw
materials.
“It isn’t looms and engines we are worrying about, Bradley,” said a man pallid and fretful with hunger. “It is flesh and blood, that can’t stand hunger much longer. It’s our lile lads and lasses, and the babies at the mother’s breast, where there isn’t a drop o’ milk for their thin, white lips! O God! And you talk o’ looms and engines”—and the man sat down with a sob, unable to say another word.