EPHRAIM. Well, Matt, we've had complaints. (Querulously.) Weavers nowadays are a grumbling, discontented lot, and——
MATTHEW. Aye. Power-loom weavers are, and have cause to be. Before you started factories folk could save. It was a saying here that every man in the valley owned his own house and the one next door to it.
EPHRAIM. They complain I make a favourite of you, and, as Guy says, we must have uniformity. It's just a point of discipline.
MATTHEW. Yes, I know what discipline means. Discipline means ringing them into your factory at five in the morning and out at seven in the evening, and uniformity means fifty looms in rows all tied to a steam engine and every loom weaving the same pattern.
GUY. Look here, Butterworth, you were working when we came in. Working at nine o'clock at night.
MATTHEW. Do I complain of that? Not me. I can please myself what hours I work. It's nowt to me what time the engine stops. My engine's here. (Indicating his arms.)
GUY. Yes, and because it is, you never let it rest. Come into the factory and you've finished at seven.
MATTHEW. I'm sent away at seven. I'm under orders. I'm my own master here, Mr. Guy, and have been all my life. If I want to work, I work, and if I want to play, I play, and there's nobody to stop me, whether it's tramping over the moors getting my mind choke full of the new designs that come to me when I'm walking through the green, resting my eyes, or whether it's a cock-fight and a bellyful of ale—and you've no need to look shocked neither, Mr. Barlow, for I've seen time afore you got meddling with machines when you went cock-fighting yourself, and you weren't too big in those days to drink with me, too. And now you're telling me to come and weave in factory.
EPHRAIM. Oh, nay, Matt, I'm not.
MATTHEW. Well, I don't know. You've stood there and heard him tell me I'm to come in.