The Squire's Daughter

by Silas K. Hocking

By the end of the following May, Great St. Goram Mine was in full working order. Ralph was installed as managing director; William was made a director and secretary to the company. Lord St. Goram was in Scotland at the time, and when he applied for shares he was too late. His chagrin knew no bounds. He had imagined that he had Ralph and William in the hollow of his hand. That two country bumpkins, as he was pleased to call them, would be able to float a company had not occurred to him. He knew the project that first occupied their thoughts. He knew that he could make it impossible for them to carry their ideas into effect.

His agent had hinted to William that his lordship would be willing to take the farm off their hands at a price; hence, he believed that by applying gentle pressure, and waiting, he would be able in a very short time to get the whole thing into his hands.

For a few weeks he threatened the company with all sorts of pains and penalties, but the company was not to be bluffed. Private interest had to give way before public convenience. Where the welfare of a whole community was at stake, no petty and niggling contention about right of way was allowed to stand. The company made its own right of way, and was prepared to pay any reasonable damage.

With the company at his back, Ralph laughed in the consciousness of his strength. He had never felt strong before. It was a new experience, and a most delightful sensation. He had never lacked courage or will power, but he had been made to feel that environment or destiny—or whatever name people liked to give it—was too strong for him. Strength is relative, and in comparison with the forces arrayed against him, he had felt weaker than an infant.

When his father was driven from his home, he had bowed his head with the rest in helpless submission. When he was arrested on a false and ridiculous charge, he submitted without protest. When he saw his mother dying in a workhouse hospital, he could only groan in bitterness of spirit. When the Brick, Tile, and Clay Company gave him notice to suspend operations, he had tamely to submit. In fact, submission had been the order of his life. It had been given to others to rule; it had been his to obey.

This would not have been irksome if the rule of the strong had been wise and just. But when justice was thrust aside or trampled under foot, as if it had no place in the social order, when equity was only the shuttlecock and plaything of interested people, when the weak were denied their rights simply because they were weak, and the reward of merit was to be cuffed by the tyrant, then his soul revolted and he grew bitter and cynical in spite of himself.

Now, however, the tables had been turned. For the first time in his life he felt himself among the strong. He need no longer sit down tamely under an injustice, or submit to insults in silence. Success was power. Money was power. Combination was power.

He pulled himself up suddenly at length with a feeling almost of terror. He was in danger of becoming what he had condemned so much in others. The force and subtlety of the temptation stood revealed as in a blinding flash. It was so splendid to have strength, to be able to stalk across the land like a giant, to do just what pleased him to do, to consult no one in the doing of it. It was just in that the temptation and the danger lay. It was so easy to forget the weak, to overlook the insignificant, to treat the feeble as of no account. Strength did not constitute right.

That was a truth that tyrants never learned and that Governments too frequently shut their eyes to. God would hold him responsible for his strength. If he had the strength of ten thousand men, he still had no right to do wrong.

So at length he got to see things in their true proportion and perspective. The strength that had come to him was only an adventitious kind of strength, after all. Unless he had another and a better kind of strength to balance it, it might prove his destruction. What he needed most was moral strength, strength to use wisely and justly his opportunities, strength to hold the balance evenly, strength to do the right, whatever it might cost him, to suffer loss for conscience' sake, to do to others what he would they should do to him.