those days, but you must not think I was so intent upon it as to
be insensible to the stirring things that were happening in the
streets through which I went seeking the means to effect my purpose.
They were full of murmurings: the whole region of the Four Towns
scowled lowering from its narrow doors. The ordinary healthy flow
of people going to work, people going about their business, was
chilled and checked. Numbers of men stood about the streets in knots
and groups, as corpuscles gather and catch in the blood-vessels in
the opening stages of inflammation. The woman looked haggard and
worried. The ironworkers had refused the proposed reduction of
their wages, and the lockout had begun. They were already at "play."
The Conciliation Board was doing its best to keep the coal-miners
and masters from a breach, but young Lord Redcar, the greatest of
our coal owners and landlord of all Swathinglea and half Clayton, was
taking a fine upstanding attitude that made the breach inevitable.
He was a handsome young man, a gallant young man; his pride revolted
at the idea of being dictated to by a "lot of bally miners," and
he meant, he said, to make a fight for it. The world had treated
him sumptuously from his earliest years; the shares in the common
stock of five thousand people had gone to pay for his handsome
upbringing, and large, romantic, expensive ambitions filled
his generously nurtured mind. He had early distinguished himself
at Oxford by his scornful attitude towards democracy. There was
something that appealed to the imagination in his fine antagonism
to the crowd--on the one hand, was the brilliant young nobleman,
picturesquely alone; on the other, the ugly, inexpressive multitude,
dressed inelegantly in shop-clothes, under-educated, under-fed,
envious, base, and with a wicked disinclination for work and a wicked
appetite for the good things it could so rarely get. For common
imaginative purposes one left out the policeman from the design,