Seething mobs of men marched about, their faces lighted up as for holy war, with a smoke of cupidity.How disentangle the passion for equality from the passion of cupidity, when begins the fight for equality of possessions?
But the God was the machine.Each man claimed equality in the Godhead of the great productive machine.Every man equally was part of this Godhead.
But somehow, somewhere, Thomas Crich knew this was false.When the machine is the Godhead, and production or work is worship, then the most mechanical mind is purest and highest, the representative of God on earth.And the rest are subordinate, each according to his degree.
Riots broke out, Whatmore pit-head was in flames.This was the pit furthest in the country, near the woods.Soldiers came.From the windows of Shortlands, on that fatal day, could be seen the flare of fire in the sky not far off, and now the little colliery train, with the workmen's carriages which were used to convey the miners to the distant Whatmore, was crossing the valley full of soldiers, full of redcoats.Then there was the far-off sound of firing, then the later news that the mob was dispersed, one man was shot dead, the fire was put out.
Gerald, who was a boy, was filled with the wildest excitement and delight.
He longed to go with the soldiers to shoot the men.But he was not allowed to go out of the lodge gates.At the gates were stationed sentries with guns.Gerald stood near them in delight, whilst gangs of derisive miners strolled up and down the lanes, calling and jeering:
`Now then, three ha'porth o'coppers, let's see thee shoot thy gun.'
Insults were chalked on the walls and the fences, the servants left.
And all this while Thomas Crich was breaking his heart, and giving away hundreds of pounds in charity.Everywhere there was free food, a surfeit of free food.Anybody could have bread for asking, and a loaf cost only three-ha'pence.Every day there was a free tea somewhere, the children had never had so many treats in their lives.On Friday afternoon great basketfuls of buns and cakes were taken into the schools, and great pitchers of milk, the school children had what they wanted.They were sick with eating too much cake and milk.
And then it came to an end, and the men went back to work.But it was never the same as before.There was a new situation created, a new idea reigned.Even in the machine, there should be equality.No part should be subordinate to any other part: all should be equal.The instinct for chaos had entered.Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes.In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another.It is a condition of being.
But the desire for chaos had risen, and the idea of mechanical equality was the weapon of disruption which should execute the will of man, the will for chaos.
Gerald was a boy at the time of the strike, but he longed to be a man, to fight the colliers.The father however was trapped between two halftruths, and broken.He wanted to be a pure Christian, one and equal with all men.
He even wanted to give away all he had, to the poor.Yet he was a great promoter of industry, and he knew perfectly that he must keep his goods and keep his authority.This was as divine a necessity in him, as the need to give away all he possessed -- more divine, even, since this was the necessity he acted upon.Yet because he did not act on the other ideal, it dominated him, he was dying of chagrin because he must forfeit it.He wanted to be a father of loving kindness and sacrificial benevolence.
The colliers shouted to him about his thousands a year.They would not be deceived.
When Gerald grew up in the ways of the world, he shifted the position.
He did not care about the equality.The whole Christian attitude of love and self-sacrifice was old hat.He knew that position and authority were the right thing in the world, and it was useless to cant about it.They were the right thing, for the simple reason that they were functionally necessary.They were not the be-all and the end-all.It was like being part of a machine.He himself happened to be a controlling, central part, the masses of men were the parts variously controlled.This was merely as it happened.As well get excited because a central hub drives a hundred outer wheels or because the whole universe wheels round the sun.After all, it would be mere silliness to say that the moon and the earth and Saturn and Jupiter and Venus have just as much right to be the centre of the universe, each of them separately, as the sun.Such an assertion is made merely in the desire of chaos.
Without bothering to think to a conclusion, Gerald jumped to a conclusion.He abandoned the whole democratic-equality problem as a problem of silliness.What mattered was the great social productive machine.Let that work perfectly, let it produce a sufficiency of everything, let every man be given a rational portion, greater or less according to his functional degree or magnitude, and then, provision made, let the devil supervene, let every man look after his own amusements and appetites, so long as he interfered with nobody.
So Gerald set himself to work, to put the great industry in order.In his travels, and in his accompanying readings, he had come to the conclusion that the essential secret of life was harmony.He did not define to himself at all clearly what harmony was.The word pleased him, he felt he had come to his own conclusions.And he proceeded to put his philosophy into practice by forcing order into the established world, translating the mystic word harmony into the practical word organisation.
Immediately he saw the firm, he realised what he could do.He had a fight to fight with Matter, with the earth and the coal it enclosed.