DAJRK SATANIC MILLS 57

but their keep. An American cotton planter who bought and bred
his own slaves had an interest in being careful of his "Labour."
A Lancashire cotton manufacturer only hired his; his responsi-
bility for it began and ended at the factory gates.1 He was
merely concerned with paying as little for it and getting as
much out * of it as possible. And this was precisely what the
economists—the "feelosophers" of Cobbett's indignant phrase—
told him to do. Selfishness had been elevated by the theorists of'
the study into a public virtue.

There were many manufacturers whose consciences were
repelled by these methods of conducting business. But not only
were they told by those learned in such matters that to question
economic law was folly, but the competition of rivals who had no
such scruples about underpaying and overworking their wretched
employees compelled them under pain of bankruptcy to do the
same. A kind of Gresham's law operated to debase the standard
of the best employer to that of the lowest. Among the small
millowners—and even in capitalist Lancashire the unit of
employment was still by modern standards very small—were
many of humble origin who had achieved wealth by their talent
for using their elbows. Though men often of splendid vigour,
courage and independence, they were without the ruling tradition
of responsibility and noblesse oblige, and the professors of economic
science told them that such scruples were in any case antiquated
and useless. They had one main concern, to get rich, and by
every legitimate method available. As is often the way with ser-
vants turned master, they tended to confuse discipline with terror.
Their own manners and habits were rough and brutal,2 and they
saw no reason to soften them in their relations with employees.

Machinery gave them their chance. Every new invention by
simplifying the processes of manufacture and multiplying the
rate of output increased their opportunities for growing rich.
They took them with all the boisterous energy of their race. All
' that was needed by the new "manufacturer," working not
by his own hand but by machine and proxy, was capital enough

ltt A man may assemble five hundred workmen one week and dismiss them the next,
without having any further connection with them than to receive a week's work for a
week's wages, nor any further solicitude ahout their future fate than if they were so
many old shuttles." Sir W. Scott, Familiar Letters, Vol. //, igth Mayt 1820. The practice1
still seemed shocking to any one nursed in the older social system.

aln the early years of the nineteenth century the publican of a famous Manchester
tavern patronised by the town's leading manufacturers used to expel his customers at
dosing time with the help of a lash, A. £ Frcmantlc, England in the Nineteenth Center?, 4*,