MATTHEW. If you weren't an ignorant Frenchman you'd suffer for those words. I'm not a favourite. It isn't me. It's my work. There's never been a yard of faulty cloth made on my loom. It's good. It's the honest work of a man that takes a pride in making it good, not like your rotten machine-made muck that's turned out at the factory. That's why Mr. Barlow sends me yarn to weave. He gets his special price for the cloth I weave and he knows it pays to let me weave it. That's not making a favourite of me. It's business.
JOE (quietly). It's making an exception of you, Matthew. You're working all the hours God sends, but you're drawing good money every week and you're living in comfort with your missus and your daughter both at home. My girls are in the factory and the wages of the lot of us don't keep the cold and hunger from our door.
MATTHEW. What else do you expect but distress when you've let them get machines to do the work of men? It's Arkwright's spinning frames and Watt's steam engines that take the bread from your mouths. It isn't Barlow's, nor Heppenstall's, nor Whitworth's over the hill, nor Mottershead's, nor any of the manufacturers. It's steel and iron that have got you down, and more fools you for letting them.
HENRI. You talk like one of us already.
MATTHEW. Aye? Only I'm not one of you.
JOE. Is it our fault? We can't all weave like you. We're not all master craftsmen with looms of our own and no debts hanging round our necks. The machines are there. We can't get beyond it.
HENRI. We can break the machines.
MATTHEW (sharply). No violence. Violence never did anybody good.
HENRI. We did no good in France until we took the Bastille.
MATTHEW. And did that do any good? You're here, in exile, because your countrymen forgot the Bastille and welcomed Louis Bourbon back.