"Besides," she urged, "your mother belonged to one of the oldest
families in England."

"And what more can man desire than wealth with descent from a county
family! Could a man be happier than I ought to be, sprung as I am from
monopolists of all the sources and instruments of production--of land on
the one side, and of machinery on the other? This very ground on which
we are resting was the property of my mother's father. At least the law
allowed him to use it as such. When he was a boy, there was a fairly
prosperous race of peasants settled here, tilling the soil, paying him
rent for permission to do so, and making enough out of it to satisfy
his large wants and their own narrow needs without working themselves to
death. But my grandfather was a shrewd man. He perceived that cows and
sheep produced more money by their meat and wool than peasants by their
husbandry. So he cleared the estate. That is, he drove the peasants from
their homes, as my father did afterwards in his Scotch deer forest. Or,
as his tombstone has it, he developed the resources of his country. I
don't know what became of the peasants; HE didn't know, and, I presume,
didn't care. I suppose the old ones went into the workhouse, and the
young ones crowded the towns, and worked for men like my father in
factories. Their places were taken by cattle, which paid for their food
so well that my grandfather, getting my father to take shares in the
enterprise, hired laborers on the Manchester terms to cut that canal for
him. When it was made, he took toll upon it; and his heirs still take
toll, and the sons of the navvies who dug it and of the engineer who
designed it pay the toll when they have occasion to travel by it, or
to purchase goods which have been conveyed along it. I remember my
grandfather well. He was a well-bred man, and a perfect gentleman in his
manners; but, on the whole, I think he was wickeder than my father, who,
after all, was caught in the wheels of a vicious system, and had either