John Rutherford, the owner of the firm "Rutherford and Son," is possessed by the phantom of the past—the thing handed down to him by his father and which he must pass on to his son with undiminished luster; the thing that has turned his soul to iron and his heart to stone; the thing for the sake of which he has never known joy and because of which no one else must know joy,—"Rutherford and Son."
The crushing weight of this inexorable monster on Rutherford and his children is significantly summed up by young John:
John. Have you ever heard of Moloch? No.... Well, Moloch was a sort of a God ... some time ago, you know, before Dick and his kind came along. They built his image with an ugly head ten times the size of a real head, with great wheels instead of legs, and set him up in the middle of a great dirty town. And they thought him a very important person indeed, and made sacrifices to him ... human sacrifices ... to keep him going, you know. Out of every family they set aside one child to be an offering to him when it was big enough, and at last it became a sort of honor to be dedicated in this way, so much so, that the victims came themselves gladly to be crushed out of life under the great wheels. That was Moloch.
Janet. Dedicated—we are dedicated—all of us—to Rutherfords'.
Not only the Rutherford children, their withered Aunt Ann, and old Rutherford himself, but even Martin, the faithful servant in the employ of the Rutherfords for twenty-five years, is "dedicated," and when he ceases to be of use to their Moloch, he is turned into a thief and then cast off, even as Janet and John.
Not love for John, his oldest son, or sympathy with the latter's wife and child induces old Rutherford to forgive his son's marriage with a mere shop-girl, but because he needs John to serve the house of Rutherford. The one inexorable purpose, always and ever!
His second son Richard, who is in the ministry, and "of no use" to old Rutherford's God of stone, receives the loving assurance: "You were no good for my purpose, and there's the end; for the matter o' that, you might just as well never ha' been born."
For that matter, his daughter Janet might also never have been born, except that she was "good enough" to look after her father's house, serve him, even helping take off his boots, and submitting without a murmur to the loveless, dismal life in the Rutherford home. Her father has sternly kept every suitor away, "because no one in Grantley's good enough for us." Janet has become faded, sour and miserable with yearning for love, for sunshine and warmth, and when she at last dares to partake of it secretly with her father's trusted man Martin, old Rutherford sets his iron heel upon her love, and drags it through the mud till it lies dead.
Again, when he faces the spirit of rebellion in his son John, Rutherford crushes it without the slightest hesitation in behalf of his one obsession, his one God—the House of Rutherford.
John has made an invention which holds great possibilities. By means of it he hopes to shake of the deadly grip of the Rutherfords'. He wants to become a free man and mold a new life for himself, for his wife and child. He knows his father will not credit the value of his invention. He dare not approach him: the Rutherford children have been held in dread of their parent too long.