Dorothy shook her head. “I’m just as much in the fog now as ever,” she said, “I see if I want to know anything about this wonderful new departure I must ask Lucy. Do get on; you and your Co-op that isn’t a Co-op after all. But you will not be a very bloated capitalist, will you, Tom?” she concluded mischievously.
“We aren’t going to be capitalists at all. I’m just going to start the concern with my bit of a fortune—it doesn’t look so much of a fortune as it did, now I know what a little way it will go. But any way Ben and I are going to work in it, side by side with the hands. We are all going to be hands together. Of course, in a sense, there’ll be a master; but he will be a master in a different sense from what we’re all used to. Every one of us that can do a full man’s work is to have an equal share in the profit, always provided he does the work he is capable of. There will be shorter hours and less work for the youngsters. But the share of all will depend on the profits we make, and no one is to have a greater share than another.”
“But that seems ridiculous, Tom. If you are to turn manufacturer like my uncle, why, you must be a manufacturer. You will have to go to market as he does, and meet and bargain with your customers, to dress like them, to mix with them as an equal. How can you do that on the lines you are laying down? I am only a silly girl, may be, and certainly I don’t know much about business, but go on,—this grows interesting.”
“I know the difficulties, Miss Dorothy, but the difficulty will not be in Ben, and I hope not in me. The difficulty will be in getting a sufficient number of men, capable, reliable, sober, industrious men who can be brought to see that in our scheme there will not only be an escape from the thraldom of the capital they denounce so hotly, but a realization of that equality and fraternity for which men and women have gone to their graves like bed. The difficulty will be to persuade men not merely that they will be better off themselves, but that they must be content to take part of their wage in seeing a worse workman than themselves better off too. Labour is just as selfish as capital. But in our mill no matter what a man’s allotted task, so long as he does his work faithfully, he shall share and share alike.”
“But that seems just a little absurd, don’t you think?” asked Dorothy, now genuinely interested. “You must make all this clear to me. You don’t mean to say that if you, say, are the designer or the traveller, you are to draw no more profit out of the concern than a teamer?”
“That’s it, exactly—not a stiver. We’re all to be partners together. We’ll know neither master nor man at our mill. We’re going to try an experiment in grim earnest, and oh! Miss Dorothy, for heaven’s sake, don’t shake your head and look so glum about it. I feel sure we can succeed. We will succeed. I am young and there is no hardship, no sacrifice, no work for which I am not prepared. Perhaps I might get a situation under another; perhaps in time I might start on the usual lines and perhaps in time I might make a fortune for myself. But will it not be a grander thing and in itself a better, a more heart-satisfying future should we be able to gather round ourselves a band of workers, all knit together not merely by the selfish bonds of personal interest, but each rejoicing that he is advancing, too, his brother’s welfare, and that in his well-being and in his well-doing each and everyone of us is concerned.”
Tom had risen in the earnestness of his soul’s unburthening, and now paced the narrow strip of gravelled garden path which skirted the river-bank. His eyes were lit with unwonted fire, a flush was on his cheek, his voice gained strength and cadence as the long-pondered thoughts forced themselves to utterance, and the natural unstudied motions of his hands kept harmony with the spoken word.
“Oh! Miss Dorothy, it may all be a dream, but if a dream it be, surely it is such a one as was dreamed by the Lake of Galilee or the slopes of Olive’s Mount. Is it not meet that old men in the time to come should dream dreams, and the young men see visions. Had Ben Garside, good, staunch, true man that I know him to be, had not he dreamed dreams and seen visions could he have had it in his heart to strive and suffer as I know he did, not for himself but for the oppressed ones of his class. And shall not we of a newer time have our visions, and mine is of a glad day when the band of man shall be against his neighbour, when this unresting, cruel strife of brother seeking to outvie his brother, building ever the fabric of his success upon the undoing of another shall cease from the land, and the Kingdom of which seers have dreamed and prophets foretold shall be indeed at hand.”
Dorothy gazed in wrapt regard at the young enthusiast. She drank in the music of his words with greedy ears, and they sank into her soul. Never had man so spoken to her before. Words like these, if spoken at all, were not, in her experience, words for every day life. They should be reserved to be voiced on Sunday from the pulpit and devoutly ignored and disregarded on the Monday. But as the unpent stream of cherished conviction flowed its impetuous course Dorothy felt that she too was being swept with it, and forgot that she was the daughter of a proud and exclusive race, and he who paced before her with rapid, agitated stride, the humblest of her guardian’s henchmen.
But withal Dorothy was a practical common-sense young woman, and as little likely as any of her very practical sex to forget the stern necessities of work-a-day life, in a momentary abandon to the transcendental schemes of an enthusiast.