The girl hesitated, considered, then looked with appeal at her mistress. She clasped her hands. “‘Two are better than one,’” she replied, “‘because they have good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to lift him up.’”
“Gracious, Etruria!” Mary cried. “Is that in the Bible?”
Etruria nodded.
“And what did your preacher say about it?”
“That the employer and the workman were fellows, and if they worked together and each thought for the other they would have a good reward for their labor; that if one fell, it was the duty of the other to help him up. And again, that the land and the mill were fellows—the town and the country—and if they worked together in love they would have a good return, and if trouble came to one the other should bear with him. But all the same,” Etruria added timidly, “that the bread-taxes were wrong.”
“Etruria,” Mary said. “To-morrow is Thursday. I shall go with you to Brown Heath.”
CHAPTER X
NEW THINGS
Mary Audley, crossing the moor to a week-day service, was but one of many who in the ’forties were venturing on new courses. In religion there were those who fancied that by a return to primitive forms they might recapture the primitive fervor; and those again who, like the curate whom Mary was going to hear, were bent on pursuing the beaten path into new places. Some thought that they had found a panacea for the evils of the day in education, and put their faith in workmen’s institutes and night schools. Others were satisfied with philanthropy, and proclaimed that infants of seven ought not to toil for their living, that coal-pits were not fit places for women, and that what paid was not the only standard of life. A few dreamt of a new England in which gentle and simple were to mix on new-old terms; and a multitude, shrewd and hard-headed, believed in the Corn Law League, whose speakers travelled from Manchester to carry the claims of cheap bread to butter crosses and market towns, and there bearded the very landlord’s agent.
The truth was that the country was lying sick with new evils, and had perforce to find a cure, whether that cure lay in faith, or in the primer, or in the Golden Rule, or in Adam Smith. For two generations men had been quitting the field for the mill, the farm for the coal-pit. They had followed their work into towns built haphazard, that grew presently into cities. There, short of light, of air, of water, lacking decency, lacking even votes—for the Reform Bill, that was to give everything to everybody, had stopped at the masters—lacking everything but wages, they swarmed in numbers stupendous and alarming to the mind of that day. And then the wages failed. Machines pushed out hands, though
Tools were made, and born were hands,
Every farmer understands.