THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

inconvenient.) And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered

with his autocratic direction of his works, and his workpeople

because they were not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his

bidding. He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous human being. He

was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the ideas of

collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African

negro.

There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern

industrial world. You will find the same type with the slightest

modifications in the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey

or North Italy. No doubt you would find it in New Japan. These men

have raised themselves up from the general mass of untrained,

uncultured, poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle.

To drive others they have had first to drive themselves. They have

never yet had occasion nor leisure to think of the state or social

life as a whole, and as for dreams or beauty, it was a condition of

survival that they should ignore such cravings. All the distinctive

qualities of my uncle can be thought of as dictated by his

conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances that

expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that

sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad

views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.

His daughters were the inevitable children of his life. Queer girls

they were! Curiously "spirited" as people phrase it, and curiously

limited. During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire

several times. My uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go

into his business, was also in his odd way proud of me. I was his

nephew and poor relation, and yet there I was, a young gentleman

learning all sorts of unremunerative things in the grandest ma

"Latin and mook," while the sons of his neighhours, not nephews

merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their native town. Every

time I went down I found extensive changes and altered relations,

and before I had settled down to them off I went again. I don't

think I was one person to them; I was a series of visitors. There

is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen in unbecoming

mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen and

nineteen, but a Cambridge "man" of two and twenty with a first and

good te

for two girls of twenty-three and twenty-four.

A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green

affair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was

controlled mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat

cap. The high tea had been shifted to seven and rechristened

di

after one painful experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his

foot down and prohibited any but high-necked dresses.

"Daddy's perfectly impossible," Sybil told me.

The foot had descended vehemently! "My own daughters!" he had said,

"dressed up like -"-and had arrested himself and fumbled and

decided to say-"actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every

fool to stare at!" Nor would he have any people invited to di

He didn't, he had explained, want strangers poking about in his

house when he came home tired. So such calling as occurred went on

during his absence in the afternoon.

One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of

the industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous

insulations. There were no customs of intercourse in the Five

Towns. All the isolated prosperities of the district sprang from

economising, hard driven homes, in which there was neither time nor

means for hospitality. Social intercourse centred very largely upon

the church or chapel, and the chapels were better at bringing people

together than the Establishment to which my cousins belonged. Their

chief outlet to the wider world lay therefore through the

acquaintances they had formed at school, and through two much less

prosperous families of relations who lived at Longton and Hanley. A

number of gossiping friendships with old school mates were "kept

up," and my cousins would "spend the afternoon" or even spend the

day with these; such occasions led to other encounters and

interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetings

that formed the emotional thread of their lives. When the billiard

table had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved

friends for an occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for

glory and the girls. Both of them played very well. They never, so

far as I know, dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic

conflicts they began to go to dances, they went with the quavering

co

houses on the way. There was a te

afternoon rendezvous, and I recall that in the period of my earlier

visits the young bloods of the district found much satisfaction in