Hope Mills by Amanda Minnie Douglas (lightweight ebook reader txt) 📕

muddled. I don't pretend to see my way clear, only I think we have just begun the fight. It is as much of an irrepressible conflict as that other, for which so many brave men gave their lives. And one point in it no one seems to take note of. We are proud of the increase of population in our country. Every city, town, and hamlet boasts of it, and the depopulated places run to slow decay. We welcome these people; and yet they must eat to live, and the majority of them must work, or they will have nothing to eat. I think the most of them labor cheerfully, and my experience is that idleness is the worst foe of man. But, on the other hand, every year invention so protects and fortifies capital, that one must do a larger business or employ fewer men. In five years the condition of labor has greatly changed at Hope Mills, and in five years more it will change again. This is the inexorable law of nature, or, I ought to say, growing intelligence."

"Then I should say we wanted wider markets and a better classification of labor."

A quick light came into Jack's eyes.

"I think you have hit it, Maverick," he answered. "But what is everybody's business is nobody's; and we are so apt to forget that the world does move, and the condition of things changes all the time," and Jack's eyes dropped thoughtfully.

"See here, Darcy, take Brock's Hall, and talk to the men to-morrow night," began the doctor eagerly. "They will listen to you because to a certain extent you are in sympathy with them, one of their number; and you do seem to have some clear ideas on the subject. No: we'll say Wednesday night, and I will get out some posters."

Jack laughed. "What shall I tell them? I can't see how to get about the remedy clearly myself. The trade-unions have not hit it either. When they say to a man, 'Because I will not work for a certain sum, you shall not,' they lean on a reed that will surely break, and pierce themselves. Hunger is stronger than theory. No: I shall have to give the point a more thorough study before I become a blatant apostle."

Philip Maverick blew out a curling whiff of smoke, and looked at his visitor through it. Darcy gave him a curious feeling, as if a good deal of excellent material were running to waste, that if shaped and trained, and brought up to higher purposes, might be of much good service to the world. Did he realize it himself? He was twenty-four, and had a good position as things went; and Dr. Maverick had heard the women of the house were prudent and thrifty, and had a nice home. Was Darcy bounded in by conservatism, or afraid of losing? or was he honest when he said he did not know just what to do? Yet he did not look like the kind of man to go plodding all his days.

"Darcy, you puzzle me!" he began abruptly. "With that great body of yours, those strong arms and hands that look as if they could wrest Nature's secrets from her mighty soul, with that brow, and the resolute mouth, it seems as if you ought to be in better business than making cloth: pardon me. You don't use up half your energy. You ought to be planning a ship-canal across Darien, or tunnelling mountains. You're the square man; and how upon earth did you ever get fitted so smoothly to a round hole?"

Jack laughed, and told his story very simply. To him there was neither romance nor heroism in it, just a plain every-day sort of compulsion. The tunnelling would have been much more to his mind.

"Go on with the problem," said Dr. Maverick abruptly. "In the next five years I think we will all have use for our wits. We are going to see another change in matters, that will require more wisdom than is needed in mere money-making. See here, I'm interested in the thing. Let us go out, and hear what the men say about it."

Maverick rose, and put on his great-coat, and lighted another cigar. Then the two started together.

Maverick had been in the town just six months. He had studied medicine in Philadelphia and Paris, taken a three-years ramble over Europe, when a college friend begged him to come to Yerbury, and step into a vacant place. And he had what he fancied an excellent reason for it.


CHAPTER VIII.

THE men were, for the most part, in sullen earnest. From their narrower outlook they could not see that capital was on the eve of a great revulsion; that credit had been stretched to its utmost. They had their own pet plans, their own indolences and careless habits; and, as was natural, their own desires were the sweetest to them.

There were labor-meetings and harangues. There was a good deal of talk about the rights of labor and the tyranny of capital; of the rich mill and factory owners living in palaces, and the men in hovels; of what England had done, and of what we surely were coming to,--the rich growing richer, and the poor poorer. But Jack remarked that of the speakers there was not one who owned a little plot of ground, or had a bank-account. Two of them were disaffected English weavers, a third an Irishman, and the only Yerbury man was a quick-tongued, but shiftless fellow who had started in business for himself, and failed; a kind of handy Jack-at-all-trades, and correspondingly good for nothing.

Before the close of the week the men in Watkins's shoe-shop had struck. There was quite an army of them now. The saloons were filled daily and nightly. Jack thought, with a little grimness, that they might better save their money for next week's bread.

Several of the men in his room dropped in to see what he thought; and the result was, that on the following Monday morning ten of them presented themselves with a tolerably cheerful demeanor, and accepted the situation. By Tuesday night every vacant place was filled with hungry, haggard-looking men from Coldbridge. They were jeered at, and annoyed in various ways: the Yerbury men were called rats and turncoats and cowards. The mills were driven. There was another great and successful sale; in fact, amid the failures and difficulties about, Hope Mills loomed up like a star of the first magnitude.

In the spring Mrs. Eastman and Miss Lawrence went to Europe; and Fred joined a party of young men on a pleasure-tour through California. Even Mrs. Lawrence was persuaded to try Saratoga in the summer. The great house was muffled, and left in the charge of servants; but greenhouses, graperies, and all the elegant adjuncts were cared for as assiduously as ever. David Lawrence used to think it over. Sometimes he was tempted to sell out his palatial residence, but who was there to buy? Other men had been caught with just such elephants on their hands. The papers were full of offers "at an immense sacrifice."

Business grew duller and duller. There was a very great overplus of every thing, it seemed, in the world. Harvests were so abundant, and prices so low, they were not worth the moving. Fruit lay and rotted on the ground: you could get nothing for it. And yet there were wan-eyed and hungry women and children who would have feasted regally on this waste. Mothers of families turned and patched and darned, and said there could be no new garments this winter, while store-shelves groaned under the accumulation of goods. Men were failing on this side and that; the Alton & West Line Railway stock came down with a crash, and banks were shaky. Hope Mills were closed for a month to make some repairs, as business was rather slow just now.

There was a great quaking in real estate as well. The large property-owners held on stiffly: times would improve; land was worth more to-day than ever, because every year there were more people, and they required more houses, and the thing would somehow right itself.

Jack had taken his two feminines off to a great roomy farmhouse, where they had a horse at their command. Sylvie and Miss Barry were summering at the White Mountains. Dr. Maverick found a good deal of sickness among the poorer classes, low fevers and various troubles, that he knew well enough came from insufficient diet. But what was to be done? There was so little work, so much lost time, the inexorable rent, and the importunate grocer's bill. Up on Hope Terrace the luscious grapes fell to the ground, and were swept up as so much litter; the fresh, lovely vegetables passed their prime unheeded, and were tossed in the garbage-pit.

September came in hot and sultry. Hope Mills started, but many another place did not open. There was a strange, deathly-quiet undercurrent, like the awful calm before a thunder-shower. Wages took another tumble, and now no one had the courage to make much of a fight.

The second week in October there came an appalling crash. Yerbury Bank closed its doors one morning,--the old bank that had weathered many a gale; that was considered as safe and stanch as the rock of Gibraltar itself; that held in trust the savings of widows and orphans, the balance of smaller business-men who would be ruined: indeed, it would almost ruin Yerbury itself.

There was the greatest consternation. People flew up the street, bank-book in hand; but the dumb doors seemed only to give back a pitiless glance to entreaties. What was it? What had happened? "Every penny I had in the world was in it," groaned one; and the saddening refrain was repeated over and over, sometimes with tears, at others with curses.

The old officers of Yerbury Bank had been men of the highest integrity. Some were dead; some had been pushed aside by the new, fast men who laughed at past methods, as if honor, honesty, and truth were virtues easily outgrown. Among these were the Eastmans. George was considered shrewd and far-sighted, and for two years had been one of the directors, as well as Horace. They paid the highest rate of interest, which attracted small savings from all around. There had been no whisper or fear about it, so solid was its olden reputation. There were people who would as soon have doubted the Bible.

Two days after this, George Eastman sailed for Europe, on a sudden summons,--his wife's illness. There had been a meeting called, and a short statement made. Owing to sudden and unexpected depreciation in railway-bonds and improvement-bonds, and what not, it was deemed best to suspend payment for the present. In a few weeks all would be straight again, with perhaps a trifling loss to depositors. Already the directors had been very magnanimous. Mr. Eastman and several others had turned over to the bank a large stock of mortgages: in fact, the virtue of these men was so lauded that the losses seemed to be quite thrown into the background.

But the examination revealed a sickening mass of selfishness and cupidity; transactions that were culpably careless, others dishonorable to the last degree. If the larger depositors had not been warned, there was certainly a remarkable unanimity of thought, as, for the past fortnight, they had been steadily drawing out their thousands. Wild railroad-speculations, immense mortgages on real estate that now lay flat and dead: scanty available assets that would hardly pay twenty cents on a dollar.

This was what David Lawrence heard when he returned from St. Louis, a heavy-hearted, dispirited man.