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 seen; bought a seat in Parliament from
a poor and corrupt constituency, and helped to preserve the laws by
which he had thriven. Afterwards, when his wealth grew famous, he had
less need to bribe; for modern men worship the rich as gods, and will
elect a man as one of their rulers for no other reason than that he is
a millionaire. He aped gentility, lived in a palace at Kensington, and
bought a part of Scotland to make a deer forest of. It is easy enough to
make a deer forest, as trees are not necessary there. You simply drive
off the peasants, destroy their houses, and make a desert of the land.
However, my father did not shoot much himself; he generally let the
forest out by the season to those who did. He purchased a wife of gentle
blood too, with the unsatisfactory result now before you. That is
how Jesse Trefusis, a poor Manchester bagman, contrived to be come a
plutocrat and gentleman of landed estate. And also how I, who never did
a stroke of work in my life, am overburdened with wealth; whilst the
children of the men who made that wealth are slaving as their fathers
slaved, or starving, or in the workhouse, or on the streets, or the
deuce knows where. What do you think of that, my love?"