from starving,
and of the rest you shall make me a present to reward me for my virtue
in saving money. Such is the bargain I propose. It is, in my opinion,
fair and calculated to encourage thrifty habits. If it does not strike
you in that light, you can get a factory and raw cotton for yourselves;
you shall not use mine.' In other words, they might go to the devil and
starve--Hobson's choice!--for all the other factories were owned by men
who offered no better terms. The Manchesterians could not bear to starve
or to see their children starve, and so they accepted his terms and went
into the factory. The terms, you see, did not admit of their beginning
to save for themselves as he had done. Well, they created great wealth
by their labor, and lived on very little, so that the balance they gave
for nothing to my father was large. He bought more cotton, and more
machinery, and more factories with it; employed more men to make wealth
for him, and saw his fortune increase like a rolling snowball. He
prospered enormously, but the work men were no better off than at first,
and they dared not rebel and demand more of the money they had made, for
there were always plenty of starving wretches outside willing to take
their places on the old terms. Sometimes he met with a check, as, for
instance, when, in his eagerness to increase his store, he made the men
manufacture more cotton than the public needed; or when he could not get
enough of raw cotton, as happened during the Civil War in America. Then
he adapted himself to circumstances by turning away as many workmen as
he could not find customers or cotton for; and they, of course, starved
or subsisted on charity. During the war-time a big subscription was got
up for these poor wretches, and my father subscribed one hundred pounds,
in spite, he said, of his own great losses. Then he bought new machines;
and, as women and children could work these as well as men, and were
cheaper and more docile, he turned away about seventy out of every
hundred of his HANDS (so he called the men), and replaced them by their
wives and children, who made money for him faster than ever. By this
time he had long ago given up managing the factories, and paid clever
fellows who had no money of their own a few hundreds a year to do it for
him. He also purchased shares in other concerns conducted on the same
principle; pocketed dividends made in countries which he had never
visited by men whom he had never se