In a nutshell Armitage's scheme amounted to an offer to buy up the mines for £30,000 and put the men on a wage, allowing every man a percentage of 20 per cent. profit on all stones over a certain standard and size. The men would be asked to elect their own manager, who would be expected to see that engineering and development designs were carried out, but otherwise the normal routine of work in the mines would be observed. Mr. Armitage explained that he hoped to occupy the position of general manager in the company himself, and engaged it to observe the union rates of hours and wages as they were accepted by miners and mining companies throughout the country.
When he had finished speaking there was no doubt in anyone's mind that John Lincoln Armitage had made a very pleasant picture of what life on the Ridge might be if success attended the scheme of the Armitage Syndicate, as John Armitage seemed to believe it would. Men who had been driven to consider Armitage's offer from their first hearing of it, because of the lean years the Ridge was passing through, were almost persuaded by his final exposition.
George Woods stood up.
George's strength was in his equable temper, in his downright honesty and sincerity, and in the steady common-sense with which he reviewed situations and men.
He realised the impression Armitage's statement of his scheme, and its bearing on the life of the Ridge, had made. It did not affect his own position, but he feared its influence on men who had been wavering between prospects of the old and of the new order of things for Fallen Star. In their hands, he could see now, the fate of all that Fallen Star had stood for so long, would lie.
"Well," he said, "we've got to thank you for puttin' the thing to us as clear and as square as you have, Mr. Armitage. It gives every man here a chance to see just what you're drivin' at. But I might say here and now ... I've got no time for it ... neither me nor my mates.... It'll save time and finish the business of this meeting if there's no beatin' about the bush and we understand each other right away. It sounds all right—your scheme—nice and easy. Looks as if there was more for us to get out of it than to lose by it.... I don't say it wouldn't mean easier times ... more money ... all that sort of thing. We haven't had the easiest of times here sometimes, and this scheme of yours comes ... just when we're in the worst that's ever knocked us. But speakin' for myself, and"—his glance round the hall was an appeal to that principle the Ridge stood for-"the most of my mates, we'd rather have the hard times and be our own masters. That's what we've always said on the Ridge.... Your scheme 'd be all right if we didn't feel like that; I suppose. But we do ... and as far as I'm concerned, we won't touch it. It's no go.
"We're obliged to you for putting the thing to us. We recognise you could have gone another way about getting control here. You may—-buy up a few of the mines perhaps, and try to squeeze the rest of us out. Not that I think the boys'd stand for the experiment."
"They wouldn't," Bill Grant called.
"I'm glad to hear that," George said. He tried to point out that if Fallen Star miners accepted Armitage's offer they would be shouldering conditions which would take from their work the freedom and interest that had made their life in common what it had been on the Ridge. He asked whether a weekly Wage to tide them over years of misfortune would compensate for loss of the sense of being free men; he wanted to know how they'd feel if they won a nest of knobbies worth £400 or £500 and got no more out of them than the weekly wage. The percentage on big stones was only a bluff to encourage men to hand over big stones, George said. And that, beyond the word being used pretty frequently in Mr. Armitage's argument and documents, was all the profit-sharing he could see in Mr. Armitage's scheme. He reminded the men, too, that under their own system, in a day they could make a fortune. And all there was for them under Mr. Armitage's system was three or four pounds a week—and not a bit of potch, nor a penny in the quart pot for their old age.
"We own these mines. Every man here owns his mine," George said; "that's worth more to us just now than engineers and prospecting parties.... Well have them on our own account directly, when the luck turns and there's money about again.... For the present we'll hang on to what we've got, thank you, Mr. Armitage."