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 4Sar6ata ^einetodk Lectures on
Clje R a t a l s of Ctaie

THE ETHICS OF COOPERATION. By

JAMBS H . TOFTS.
HIGHER EOUCATION AND BUSINESS
STANDARDS. By WILLARD EUGENE
HOTCHKISS.
CREATING CAPITAL: MONEY-MAKING
A S A N A I M IN B U S I N E S S . B y FRBDEKICK
L . LLPMAN.
IS CIVILIZATION A D I S E A S E ? By STAN-
TON COIT.
SOCIAL JUSTICE WITHOUT SOCIALISM.
By JOHN BATES CLARK.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN PRIVATE MO-
NOPOLY AND GOOD CITIZENSHIP. By
JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS.
COMMERCIALISM AND JOURNALISM. By
HAMILTON HOLT.
THE BUSINESS CAREER IN ITS PUBLIC
RELATIONS. By ALBERT SHAW.
THE ETHICS OF
COOPERATION
 THE ETHICS
OF COOPERATION
BY

JAMES H. TUFTS
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY
OF CHICAGO

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
ffibt SUiuraRie $rti< CanfttOige
1918
C O P Y R I G H T , 1918, B Y T H E K K G K N T S O F T H E
U N I V B R S I T Y OF C A L I F O R N I A

A L L RIGHTS RESERVBD

Publishei September rprS

 BARBARA WEINSTOCK
LECTURES ON THE MORALS
OF TRADE

This series will contain essays by

representative scholars and men of
affairs dealing with the various phases
of the moral law in its bearing on
business life under the new economic
order, first delivered at the University
of California on the Weinstock founda-
tion.
 THE ETHICS
OF COOPERATION
i
C C O R D I N G to Plato's famous
myth, two gifts of the gods
equipped man for living: the one, arts and
inventions to supply him with the means
of livelihood; the other, reverence and
justice to be the ordering principles of
societies and the bonds of friendship and
conciliation. Agencies for mastery over
nature and agencies for cooperation
among men remain the two great sources
of human power. But after two thousand
years, it is possible to note an interesting
fact as to their relative order of develop-
i T H E ETHICS
ment in civilization. Nearly all the great
skills and inventions that had been ac-
quired up to the eighteenth century were
brought into man's service at a very early
date. T h e use of fire, the arts of weaver,
potter, and metal worker, of sailor,
hunter, fisher, and sower, early fed man
and clothed him. These were carried
to higher perfection by Egyptian and
Greek, by Tyrian and Florentine, but it
would be difficult to point to any great
new unlocking of material resources un-
til the days of the chemist and electri-
cian. Domestic animals and crude water
mills were for centuries in man's serv-
ice, and until steam was harnessed, no
additions were made of new powers.
During this long period, however, the
 OF COOPERATION 3

progress of human association made great

and varied development. T h e gap be-
tween the men of Santander's caves, or
early E g y p t , and the civilization of a cen-
tury ago is bridged rather by union of
human powers, by the needs and stim-
ulating contacts of society, than by con-
quest in the field of nature. It was in
military, political, and religious organ-
ization that the power of associated effort
was first shown. A r m y , state, and hier-
archy were its visible representatives.
T h e n , a little over a century ago, began
w h a t w e call the industrial revolution,
still incomplete, which combined new
natural forces with new forms of human
association. Steam, electricity, machines,
the factory system, railroads: these sug-
4 T H E ETHICS
gest the natural forces at man's disposal;
capital, credit, corporations, labor un-
ions : these suggest the bringing together
of men and their resources into units
for exploiting or controlling the new
natural forces. Sometimes resisting the
political, military, or ecclesiastical forces
which were earlier in the lead, some-
times mastering them, sometimes com-
bining with them, economic organiza-
tion has now taken its place in the world
as a fourth great structure, or rather as
a fourth great agency through which
man achieves his greater tasks, and in
so doing becomes conscious of hitherto
unrealized powers.
Early in this great process of so-
cial organization three divergent types
 OF COOPERATION 5
emerged, which still contend for su-
premacy in the worlds of action and of
valuation: dominance, competition, and
cooperation. All mean a meeting of hu-
man forces. They rest respectively on
power, rivalry, and sympathetic inter-
change. Each may contribute to human
welfare. On the other hand, each may
be taken so abstractly as to threaten hu-
man values. I hope to point out that
the greatest of these is cooperation, and
that it is largely the touchstone for the
others.
Cooperation and dominance both
mean organization. Dominance implies
inequality, direction and obedience, su-
perior and subordinate. Cooperation
implies some sort of equality, some mu-
6 THE ETHICS
tual relation. It does not exclude dif-
ference in ability or in function. It does
not exclude leadership, for leadership is
usually necessary to make cooperation
effective. But in dominance the special
excellence is kept isolated; ideas are
transmitted from above downward. In
cooperation there is interchange, cur-
rents flowing in both directions, con-
tacts of mutual sympathy, rather than
of pride-humility, condescension-servil-
ity. The purpose of the joint pursuit in
organization characterized by domi-
nance may be either the exclusive good
of the master or the joint good of the
whole organized group, but in any case
it is a purpose formed and kept by
those few who know. The group may
 OF COOPERATION 7

share in its execution and its benefits,

but not in its construction or in the es-
timating and forecasting of its values.
T h e purpose in cooperation is joint.
W h e t h e r originally suggested by some
leader of thought or action, or whether
a composite of many suggestions in the
give and take of discussion or in experi-
ences of common need, it is weighed
and adopted as a common end. It is
not the work or possession of leaders
alone, but embodies in varying degrees
the work and active interest of all.
CoSperation and competition at first
glance may seem more radically op-
posed. F o r while dominance and coop-
eration both mean union of forces,
competition appears to mean antago-
8 THE ETHICS
nism. They stand for combination; it
for exclusion of one by another. Yet a
deeper look shows that this is not true
of competition in what we may call its
social, as contrasted with its unsocial,
aspect. The best illustration of what I
venture to call social competition is
sport. Here is rivalry, and here in any
given contest one wins, the other loses,
or few win and many lose. But the
great thing in sport is not to win; the
great thing is the game, the contest;
and the contest is no contest unless the
contestants are so nearly equal as to for-
bid any certainty in advance as to which
will win. The best sport is found when
no one contestant wins too often. There
is in reality a common purpose — the
 OF COOPERATION 9

zest of contest. Players combine and

compete to carry out this purpose; and
the rules are designed so to restrict the
competition as to rule out certain kinds
o f action and preserve friendly rela-
tions. T h e contending rivals are in re-
ality uniting to stimulate each other.
W i t h o u t the cooperation there would
be no competition, and the competition
is so conducted as to continue the rela-
tion. Competition in the world of
thought is similarly social. In efforts
to reach a solution of a scientific prob-
lem or to discuss a policy, the spur of
rivalry or the matching of wits aids the
common purpose of arriving at the
truth. Similar competition exists in
business. M a n y a firm owes its success
IO T H E ETHICS
to the competition of its rivals which
has forced it to be efficient, progressive.
As a manufacturing friend once re-
marked to m e : " When the other man
sells cheaper, you generally find he has
found out something you don't know."
But we also apply the term " compe-
tition " to rivalry in which there is no
common purpose; to contests in which
there is no intention to continue or re-
peat the match, and in which no rules
control. Weeds compete with flowers
and crowd them out. T h e factory com-
petes with the hand loom and banishes
it. T h e trust competes with the small
firm and puts it out of business. T h e
result is monopoly. When plants or
inventions are thus said to compete for
 OF COOPERATION n
a place, there is frequently no room for
both competitors, and no social gain by
keeping both in the field. Competition
serves here sometimes as a method of
selection, although no one would decide
to grow weeds rather than flowers be-
cause weeds are more efficient. In the
case of what are called natural monop-
olies, there is duplication of effort instead
of cooperation. Competition is here
wasteful. But when we have to do, not
with a specific product, or with a fixed
field such as that of street railways or city
lighting, but with the open field of in-
vention and service, we need to provide
for continuous cooperation, and compe-
tition seems at least one useful agency.
T o retain this, we frame rules against
12 T H E ETHICS
" unfair competition." As the rules of
sport are designed to place a premium
upon certain kinds of strength and skill
which make a good game, so the rules
of fair competition are designed to se-
cure efficiency for public service, and
to exclude efficiency in choking or
fouling. In unfair competition there is
no common purpose of public service
or of advancing skill or invention;
hence, no cooperation. The coopera-
tive purpose or result is thus the test of
useful, as contrasted with wasteful or
harmful, competition.
There is also an abstract conception
of cooperation, which, in its one-sided
emphasis upon equality, excludes any
form of leadership, or direction, and in
 OF C O O P E R A T I O N 13
fear of inequality allows no place for
competition. Selection of rulers by lot
in a large and complex group is one illus-
tration ; jealous suspicion of ability, which
becomes a cult of incompetence, is an-
other. Refusals to accept inventions
which require any modification of in-
dustry, or to recognize any inequalities
of service, are others. But these do not
affect the value of the principle as we can
now define it in preliminary fashion:
union tending to secure common ends,
by a method which promotes equality,
and with an outcome of increased power
shared by all.
 II

What are we to understand by the

Ethics of Cooperation? Can we find
some external standard of unquestioned
value or absolute duty by which to meas-
ure the three processes of society which
we have named, dominance, competition,
cooperation ? Masters of the past have
offered many such, making appeal to the
logic of reason or the response of senti-
ment, to the will for mastery or the claim
of benevolence. To make a selection
without giving reasons would seem arbi-
trary ; to attempt a reasoned discussion
would take us quite beyond the bounds
appropriate to this lecture. But aside
from the formulations of philosophers,
 OF COOPERATION 15

humanity has been struggling — often

rather haltingly and blindly — for cer-
tain goods and setting certain sign-posts
which, if they do not point to a highway,
at least mark certain paths as blind alleys.
Such goods I take to be the great words,
liberty, power, justice; such signs of blind
paths I take to be rigidity, passive accept-
ance of what is.
But those great words, just because
they are so great, are given various mean-
ings by those who would claim them for
their own. N o r is there complete agree-
ment as to just what paths deserve to be
posted as leading nowhere. Groups char-
acterized by dominance, cut-throat c o m -
petition, or cooperation, tend to work out
each its own interpretations of liberty,
16 THE ETHICS
power, justice; its own code for the con-
duct of its members. Without assuming
to decide your choice, I can indicate
briefly what the main elements in these
values and codes are.
The group of masters and servants
will develop what we have learned to
call a morality of masters and a moral-
ity of slaves. This was essentially the
code of the feudal system. We have sur-
vivals of such a group morality in our
code of the gentleman, which in Eng-
land still depreciates manual labor, al-
though it has been refined and softened
and enlarged to include respect for other
than military and sportsman virtues. The
code of masters exalts liberty—for the
ruling class — and resents any restraint
 OF C O O P E R A T I O N 17
by inferiors or civilians, or by public
opinion of any group but its own. It has
a justice which takes for its premise a
graded social order, and seeks to put and
keep every man in his place. But its
supreme value is power, likewise for
the few, or for the state as consisting of
society organized and directed by the
ruling class. Such a group, according to
Treitschke, will also need war, in order
to test and exhibit its power to the utmost
in fierce struggle with other powers. It
will logically honor war as good.
A group practicing cut-throat com-
petition will simply reverse the order:
first, struggle to put rivals out of the
field; then, monopoly with unlimited
power to control the market or possess
18 THE ETHICS
the soil. It appeals to nature's struggle
for existence as its standard for human
life. It too sets a high value upon liberty
in the sense of freedom from control,
but originating as it did in resistance to
control by privilege and other aspects of
dominance, it has never learned the de-
fects of a liberty which takes no account
of ignorance, poverty, and ill health. It
knows the liberty of nature, the liberty
of the strong and the swift, but not the
liberty achieved by the common eiFort
for all. It knows justice, but a justice
which is likely to be defined as securing
to each his natural liberty, and which
therefore means non-interference with
the struggle for existence except to pre-
vent violence and fraud. It takes no ac-
 OF COOPERATION 19
count as to whether the struggle kills few
or many, or distributes goods widely or
sparingly, or whether indeed there is any
room at the table which civilization
spreads; though it does not begrudge
charity if administered under that name.
A cooperating group has two working
principles: first, common purpose and
common good ; second, that men can
achieve by common effort what they can-
not accomplish singly. The first, rein-
forced by the actual interchange of ideas
and services, tends to favor equality. It
implies mutual respect, confidence, and
good-will. The second favors a construc-
tive and progressive attitude, which will
find standards neither in nature nor in
humanity's past, since it conceives man
20 T H E ETHICS
able to change conditions to a consider-
able extent and thus to realize new goods.
These principles tend toward a type
of liberty different from those just men-
tioned. A s contrasted with the liberty of
a dominant group, cooperation favors a
liberty for all, a liberty of live and let
live, a tolerance and welcome for vari-
ation in type, provided only this is willing
to make its contribution to the common
weal. Instead of imitation or passive ac-
ceptance of patterns on the part of the
majority, it stimulates active construc-
tion. As contrasted with the liberty fa-
vored in competing groups, cooperation
would emphasize positive control over
natural forces, over health conditions,
over poverty and fear. It would make each
 OF COOPERATION ai
person share as fully as possible in the
knowledge and strength due to combined
effort, and thus liberate him from many
of the limitations which have hitherto
hampered him.
Similarly with justice. Cooperation's
ethics of distribution is not rigidly set by
the actual interest and rights of the past
on the one hand, nor by hitherto avail-
able resources on the other. Neither nat-
ural rights nor present ability and present
service form a complete measure. Since
cooperation evokes new interests and new
capacities, it is hospitable to new claims
and new rights; since it makes new
sources of supply available, it has in view
the possibility at least of doing better for
all than can an abstract insistence upon
22 T H E ETHICS
old claims. It may often avoid the dead-
lock ofa rigid system. It is better to grow
two blades of grass than to dispute who
shall have the larger fraction of the one
which has previously been the yield. It
is better, not merely because there is more
grass, but also because men's attitude be-
comes forward-looking and constructive,
not pugnacious and rigid.
Power is likewise a value in a cooper-
ating group, but it must be power not
merely used for the good of all, but to
some extent controlled by all and thus
actually shared. Only as so controlled
and so shared is power attended by the,
responsibility which makes it safe for its
possessors. Only on this basis does power
over other men permit the free choices
 OF COOPERATION 23
on their part which are essential to full
moral life.
As regards the actual efficiency of a co-
operating group, it may be granted that
its powers are not so rapidly mobilized.
In small, homogeneous groups, the loss
of time is small; in large groups the for-
mation of public opinion and the conver-
sion of this into action is still largely a
problem rather than an achievement.
N e w techniques have to be developed,
and it may be that for certain military
tasks the military technique will always
be more efficient. T o the cooperative
group, however, this test will not be the
ultimate ethical test. It will rather con-
sider the possibilities of substituting for
war other activities in which cooperation
24 T H E ETHICS
is superior. And if the advocate of war
insists that war as such is the most glori-
ous and desirable type of life, cooperation
may perhaps fail to convert him. But it
may hope to create a new order whose ex-
cellence shall be justified of her children.

HI

A glance at the past roles of domi-

nance, competition, and cooperation in
the institutions of government, religion,
and commerce and industry, will aid us
to consider cooperation in relation to
present international problems.
Primitive tribal life had elements of
each of the three principles we have
named. But with discovery by some gen-
ius of the power of organization for war
24 T H E ETHICS
is superior. And if the advocate of war
insists that war as such is the most glori-
ous and desirable type of life, cooperation
may perhaps fail to convert him. But it
may hope to create a new order whose ex-
cellence shall be justified of her children.

HI

A glance at the past roles of domi-

nance, competition, and cooperation in
the institutions of government, religion,
and commerce and industry, will aid us
to consider cooperation in relation to
present international problems.
Primitive tribal life had elements of
each of the three principles we have
named. But with discovery by some gen-
ius of the power of organization for war
 OF COOPERATION 25
the principle of dominance won, seem-
ingly at a flash, a decisive position. N o
power of steam or lightning has been
so spectacular and wide-reaching as the
power which Egyptian, Assyrian, Mace-
donian, Roman, and their modern suc-
cessors introduced and controlled. Po-
litical states owing their rise to military
means naturally followed the military
pattern. T h e sharp separation between
ruler or ruling group and subject people,
based on conquest, was perpetuated in
class distinction. Gentry and simple, lord
and villein, were indeed combined in ex-
ploitation of earth's resources, but co-
operation was in the background, mastery
in the fore. And when empires included
peoples of various races and cultural ad-
a6 T H E ETHICS
vance the separation between higher and
lower became intensified. Yet though
submerged for long periods, the principle
of cooperation has asserted itself, step by
step and it seldom loses ground. Begin-
ning usually in some group which at first
combined to resist dominance, it has
made its way through such stages as
equality before the law, abolition of
special privileges, extension of suffrage,
influence of public sentiment, inter-
change of ideas, toward genuine partici-
pation by all in the dignity and respon-
sibility of political power. It builds a
Panama Canal, it maintains a great sys-
tem of education, and has, we may easily
believe, yet greater tasks in prospect. It
may be premature to predict its complete
 OF COOPERATION 27
displacement of dominance in our own
day as a method of government, yet who
in America doubts its ultimate preva-
lence ?
Religion presents a fascinating mixture
of cooperation with dominance on the
one hand, and exclusiveness on the other.
T h e central fact is the community, which
seeks some common end in ritual, or in
beneficent activity. But at an early pe-
riod leaders became invested, or invested
themselves, with a sanctity which led to
dominance. Not the power of force, but
that of mystery and the invisible raised
the priest above the level of the many.
And, on another side, competition be-
tween rival national religions, like that
between states, excluded friendly con-
28 T H E ETHICS
tacts. Jew and Samaritan had no deal-
ings ; between the followers of Baal and
Jehovah there was no peace but by ex-
termination. Yet it was religion which
confronted the Herrenmoral with the first
reversal of values, and declared, "So
shall it not be among you. But who-
soever will be great among you let him
be your minister." And it was religion
which cut across national boundaries in
its vision of what Professor Royce so
happily calls the Great Community. Pro-
test against dominance resulted, however,
in divisions, and although cooperation in
practical activities has done much to pre-
pare the way for national understanding,
the hostile forces of the world to-day lack
the restraint which might have come
 OF COOPERATION 29
from a united moral sentiment and moral
will.
In the economic field the story of
dominance, cooperation, and competi-
tion is more complex than in govern-
ment and religion. It followed somewhat
different courses in trade and in industry.
T h e simplest way to supply needs with
goods is to go and take them; the sim-
plest way to obtain services is to seize
them. Dominance in the first case gives
piracy and plunder, when directed against
those without; fines and taxes, when ex-
ercised upon those w i t h i n ; in the second
case, it gives slavery or forced levies. But
trade, as a voluntary exchange of pres-
ents, or as a bargaining for mutual ad-
vantage, had likewise its early begin-
3o T H E ETHICS
nings. Carried on at first with timidity
and distrust, because the parties belonged
to different groups, it has developed a
high degree of mutual confidence be-
tween merchant and customer, banker
and client, insurer and insured. By its
system of contracts and fiduciary rela-
tions, which bind men of the most vary-
ing localities, races, occupations, social
classes, and national allegiance, it has
woven a new net of human relations far
more intricate and wide-reaching than
the natural ties of blood kinship. It rests
upon mutual responsibility and good
faith; it is a constant force for their
extension.
T h e industrial side of the process has
had similar influence toward union. Free
 OF COOPERATION 31
craftsmen in the towns found mutual
support in gilds, when as yet the farm
laborer or villein had to get on as best
he could unaided. T h e factory system
itself has been largely organized from
above down. It has very largely assumed
that the higher command needs no ad-
vice or ideas from below. Hours of labor,
shop conditions, wages, have largely been
fixed by " o r d e r s , " just as governments
once ruled by decrees. But as dominance
in government has led men to unite
against the new power and then has
yielded to the more complete coopera-
tion of participation, so in industry the
factory system has given rise to the labor
movement. A s for the prospects of fuller
cooperation, this may be said already to
32 T H E ETHICS
have displaced the older autocratic sys-
tem within the managing group, and the
war is giving an increased impetus to ex-
tension of the process.
Exchange of goods and services is in-
deed a threefold cooperation: it meets
wants which the parties cannot them-
selves satisfy or cannot well satisfy; it
awakens new wants; it calls new inven-
tions and new forces into play. It thus
not only satisfies man's existing nature,
but enlarges his capacity for enjoyment
and his active powers. It makes not only
for comfort, but for progress.

IV

If trade and industry, however, em-

body so fully the principle of coopera-
32 T H E ETHICS
have displaced the older autocratic sys-
tem within the managing group, and the
war is giving an increased impetus to ex-
tension of the process.
Exchange of goods and services is in-
deed a threefold cooperation: it meets
wants which the parties cannot them-
selves satisfy or cannot well satisfy; it
awakens new wants; it calls new inven-
tions and new forces into play. It thus
not only satisfies man's existing nature,
but enlarges his capacity for enjoyment
and his active powers. It makes not only
for comfort, but for progress.

IV

If trade and industry, however, em-

body so fully the principle of coopera-
 OF COOPERATION 33
tion, how does it come about that they
have on the whole had a rather low
reputation, not only among the class
groups founded on militarism, but among
philosophers and moralists ? Why do we
find the present calamities of war charged
to economic causes ? Perhaps the answer
to these questions will point the path
along which better cooperation may be
expected.
There is, from the outset, one defect
in the cooperation between buyer and
seller, employer and laborer. The co-
operation is largely unintended. Each is
primarily thinking of his own advan-
tage, rather than that of the other, or
of the social whole; he is seeking it in
terms of money, which as a material ob-
34 T H E ETHICS
ject must be in the pocket of one party
or of the other, and is not, like friend-
ship or beauty, sharable. Mutual benefit
is the result of e x c h a n g e — i t need not
be the motive. This benefit comes about
as if it were arranged by an invisible
hand, said Adam Smith. Indeed, it was
long held that if one of the bargainers
gained, the other must lose. And when
under modern conditions labor is con-
sidered as a commodity to be bought and
sold in the cheapest market by an im-
personal corporate employer, there is a
strong presumption against the coopera-
tive attitude on either side.
T h e great problem here is, therefore:
H o w can men be brought to seek con-
sciously what now they unintentionally
 OF COOPERATION 35
produce ? H o w can the man whose ends
are both self-centered and ignoble be
changed into the man whose ends are
wide and high ? Something may doubt-
less be done by showing that a narrow
selfishness is stupid. If we rule out mo-
nopoly the best way to gain great suc-
cess is likely to lie through meeting
needs of a great multitude; and to meet
these effectively implies entering by im-
agination and sympathy into their situa-
tion. T h e business maxim of "service,"
the practices of refunding money if goods
are unsatisfactory, of one price to all, of
providing sanitary and even attractive
factories and homes, and of paying a
minimum wage far in excess of the mar-
ket price, have often proved highly re-
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of
Forge and furnace: A novel
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Title: Forge and furnace: A novel

Author: Florence Warden

Release date: August 5, 2022 [eBook #68689]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: New Amsterdam Book

Company, 1896

Credits: MWS, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
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Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FORGE AND

FURNACE: A NOVEL ***
 Transcriber’s Note:

Obvious typographic errors have been

corrected.
“Oh, father, don’t, don’t! You’ll hurt him.”—Frontispiece.
FORGE AND FURNACE
 A Novel

BY
FLORENCE WARDEN
AUTHOR OF
“THE HOUSE ON THE MARSH,” “SCHEHERAZADE,” “A
PRINCE
OF DARKNESS,” ETC.

New York
NEW AMSTERDAM BOOK COMPANY
156 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1896,
BY
NEW AMSTERDAM BOOK COMPANY.
 CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE
I. A Pair of Brown Eyes 5
II. Claire 13
III. Something Wrong at the Farm 18
IV. Claire’s Apology 21
V. Bram’s Rise in Life 31
VI. Mr. Biron’s Condescension 38
VII. Bram’s Dismissal 46
VIII. Another Step Upward 54
IX. A Call and a Dinner Party 61
X. The Fine Eyes of her Cashbox 70
XI. Bram Shows Himself in a New Light 80
XII. A Model Father 86
XIII. An Ill-matched Pair 102
XIV. The Deluge 111
XV. Parent and Lover 118
XVI. The Pangs of Despised Love 126
XVII. Bram Speaks his Mind 134
XVIII. Face to Face 143
XIX. Sanctuary 151
XX. The Furnace Fires 159
XXI. The Fire Goes Out 168
XXII. Claire’s Confession 173
XXIII. Father and Daughter 184
XXIV. Mr. Biron’s Repentance 190
XXV. Meg 200
XXVI. The Goal Reached 206
FORGE AND FURNACE;
THE ROMANCE OF A SHEFFIELD BLADE.
 CHAPTER I.
A PAIR OF BROWN EYES.

Thud, thud. Amidst a shower of hot, yellow sparks the steam

hammer came down on the glowing steel, shaking the ground under
the feet of the master of the works and his son, who stood just
outside the shed. In the full blaze of the August sunshine, which was,
however, tempered by such clouds of murky smoke as only Sheffield
can boast, old Mr. Cornthwaite, acclimatized for many a year to heat
and to coal dust, stood quite unconcerned.
Tall, thin, without an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, with a
fresh-colored face which seemed to look the younger and the
handsomer for the silver whiteness of his hair and of his long, silky
moustache, Josiah Cornthwaite’s was a figure which would have
arrested attention anywhere, but which was especially noticeable for
the striking contrast he made to the rough-looking Yorkshiremen at
work around him.
Like a swarm of demons on the shores of Styx, they moved about,
haggard, gaunt, uncouth figures, silent amidst the roar of the
furnaces and the whirr of the wheels, lifting the bars of red-hot steel
with long iron rods as easily and unconcernedly as if they had been
hot rolls baked in an infernal oven, heedless of the red-hot sparks
which fell around them in showers as each blow of the steam
hammer fell.
Mr. Cornthwaite, whose heart was in his furnaces, his huge revolving
wheels, his rolling mills, and his gigantic presses, watched the work,
familiar as it was to him, with fascinated eyes.
“What day was it last month that Biron turned up here?” he asked his
son with a slight frown.
This frown often crossed old Mr. Cornthwaite’s face when he and his
son were at the works together, for Christian by no means shared his
father’s enthusiasm for the works, and was at small pains to hide the
fact.
“Oh, I’m sure I don’t remember. How should I remember?” said he
carelessly, as he looked down at his hands, and wondered how
much more black coal dust there would be on them by the time the
guv’nor would choose to let him go.
A young workman, with a long, thin, pale, intelligent face, out of
which two deep-set, shrewd, gray eyes looked steadily, glanced up
quickly at Mr. Cornthwaite. He had been standing near enough to
hear the remarks exchanged between father and son.
“Well, Elshaw, what is it?” said the elder Mr. Cornthwaite with an
encouraging smile. “Any more discoveries to-day?”
A little color came into the young man’s face.
“No, sir,” said he shyly in a deep, pleasant voice, speaking with a
broad Yorkshire accent which was not in his mouth unpleasant to the
ear. “Ah heard what you asked Mr. Christian, sir, and remember it
was on the third of the month Mr. Biron came.”
“Thanks. Your memory is always to be trusted. I think you’ve got your
head screwed on the right way, Elshaw.”
“Ah’m sure, Ah hope so, sir,” said the young fellow, smiling in return
for his employer’s smile, and touching his cap as he moved away.
“Smart lad that Elshaw,” said Mr. Cornthwaite approvingly. “And
steady. Never drinks, as so many of them do.”
“Can you wonder at their drinking?” broke out Christian with energy,
“when they have to spend their lives at this infernal work? It parches
my throat only to watch them, and I’m sure if I had to pass as many
hours as they do in this awful, grimy hole I should never be sober.”
The elder Mr. Cornthwaite looked undecided whether to frown or to
laugh at this tirade, which had at least the merit of being uttered in all
sincerity by the very person who could least afford to utter it. He
compromised by giving breath to a little sigh.
“It’s very disheartening to me to hear you say so, Chris, when it has
been the aim of my life to bring you up to carry on and build up the
business I have given my life to,” he said.
Christian Cornthwaite’s face was not an expressive one. He was
extraordinarily unlike his father in almost every way, having
prominent blue eyes, instead of his father’s piercing black ones, a
fair complexion, while his father’s was dark, a figure shorter, broader,
and less upright, and an easy, happy-go-lucky walk and manner, as
different as possible from the erect, military bearing of the head of
the firm.
What little expression he could throw into his big blue eyes he threw
into them now, as he pulled his long, ragged, tawny moustache and
echoed his father’s sigh.
“Well, isn’t it disheartening for me too, sir,” protested he good-
humoredly, “to hear you constantly threatening to put me on bread
and water for the rest of my life if I don’t settle down in this beastly
hole and try to love it?”
“It ought to be natural to you to love what has brought you up in
every comfort, educated you like a prince, and made of you——”
Josiah Cornthwaite paused, and a twinkle came into his black eyes.
“Made of you,” he went on thoughtfully, “a selfish, idle vagabond,
with only wit enough to waste the money his father has made.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Chris, quite cheerfully. “If that’s the best the
works have done for me, why should I love them?”
At that moment young Elshaw passed before his eyes again, and
recalled Christian’s attention to a subject which would, he shrewdly
thought, divert the current of his father’s thoughts from his own
deficiencies.
“I wonder, sir,” he said, “that you don’t put Bram Elshaw into the
office. He’s fit for something better than this sort of thing.”
And he waved his hand in the direction of the group in the middle of
which stood Elshaw, rod in hand, with his lean, earnest face intent on
his work.
Josiah Cornthwaite’s eyes rested on the young man. Bram was a
little above the middle height, thin, sallow, with shoulders somewhat
inclined to be narrow and sloping, but with a face which commanded
attention. He had short, mouse-colored hair, high cheek bones, a
short nose, a straight mouth, and a very long straight chin; altogether
an assemblage of features which promised little in the way of
attractiveness.
And yet attractive his face certainly was. Intelligence, strength of
character, good humor, these were the qualities which even a casual
observer could read in the countenance of Bram Elshaw.
But the lad had more in him than that. He had ambition, vague as
yet, dogged tenacity of purpose, imagination, feeling, fire. There was
the stuff; of a man of no common kind in the young workman.
Josiah Cornthwaite looked at him long and critically before
answering his son’s remark.
“Yes,” said he at last slowly, “I daresay he’s fit for something better—
indeed, I’m sure of it. But it doesn’t do to bring these young fellows
on too fast. If he gets too much encouragement he will turn into an
inventor (you know the sort of chap that’s the common pest of a
manufacturing town, always worrying about some precious
‘invention’ that turns out to have been invented long ago, or to be
utterly worthless), and never do a stroke of honest work again.”
“Now, I don’t think Elshaw’s that sort of chap,” said Chris, who
looked upon Bram as in some sort his protégé, whose merit would
be reflected on himself. “Anyhow, I think it would be worth your while
to give him a trial, sir.”
“But he would never go back to this work afterwards if he proved a
failure in the office.”
“Not here, certainly.”
“And we should lose a very good workman,” persisted Mr.
Cornthwaite, who had conservative notions upon the subject of
promotion from the ranks.
“Well, I believe it would turn out all right,” said Chris.
His father was about to reply when his attention was diverted by the
sudden appearance, at the extreme end of the long avenue of sheds
and workshops, of two persons who, to judge by the frown which
instantly clouded his face, were very unwelcome.
“That old rascal again! That old rascal Theodore Biron! Come to
borrow again, of course! But I won’t see him. I won’t——”
“But, Claire, don’t be too hard on the old sinner, for the girl’s sake,
sir,” said Chris hastily, cutting short his protests.
Mr. Cornthwaite turned sharply upon his son.
“Yes, the old fox is artful enough for that. He uses his daughter to get
himself received where he himself wouldn’t be tolerated for two
minutes. And I’ve no doubt the little minx is up to every move on the
board too.”
“Oh, come, sir, you’re too hard,” protested Chris with real warmth,
and with more earnestness than he had shown on the subject either
of his own career or of Bram’s. “I’d stake my head for what it’s worth,
and I suppose you’d say that isn’t much, on the girl’s being all right.”
But this championship did not please his father at all. Josiah
Cornthwaite’s bushy white eyebrows met over his black eyes, and
his handsome, ruddy-complexioned face lost its color. Chris was
astonished, and regretted his own warmth, as his father answered in
the tones he could remember dreading when he was a small boy—
“Whether she’s all right or all wrong, I warn you not to trouble your
head about her. You may rely upon my doing the best I can for her,
on account of my relationship to her mother. But I would never
countenance an alliance between the family of that old reprobate
and mine.”
But to this Chris responded with convincing alacrity—
“An alliance! Good heavens, no, sir! We suffer quite enough at the
hands of the old nuisance already. And I have no idea, I assure you,
of throwing myself away.”
Josiah Cornthwaite still kept his shrewd black eyes fixed upon his
son, and he seemed to be satisfied with what he read in the face of
the latter, for he presently turned away with a nod of satisfaction as
Theodore Biron and his daughter, who had perhaps been lingering a
little until the great man’s first annoyance at the sight of them had
blown over, came near enough for a meeting.
“Ah, Mr. Cornthwaite, surely there’s no sight in the world to beat
this,” began the dapper little man airily as he held out a small,
slender, and remarkably well-shaped hand with a flourish, and kept
his eyes all the time upon the men at work in the nearest shed as if
the sight had too much fascination for him to be able readily to
withdraw his eyes. “This,” he went on, apparently not noticing that
Mr. Cornthwaite’s handshake was none of the warmest, “of a whole
community immersed in the noblest of all occupations, the turning of
the innocent, lifeless substances of the earth into tool and wheel,
ship and carriage! I must say that this place has a charm for me
which I have never found in the fairest spots of Switzerland; that
after seeing whatever was to be seen in California, the States, the
Himalayas, Russia, and the rest of it, I have always been ready to
say, not exactly with the poet, but with a full heart, ‘Give me
Sheffield!’ And to-day, when I came to have a look at the works,” he
wound up in a less lofty tone, “I thought I would bring my little Claire
to have a peep too.”
“Ah, Mr. Cornthwaite, surely there’s no sight in the world to beat
this.”—Page 10.
In spite of the absurdity of his harangue, Theodore Biron knew how
to throw into his voice and manner so much fervor. He spoke, he
gesticulated with so much buoyancy and effect, that his hearers
were amused and interested in spite of themselves, and were carried
away, for the time at least, into believing, or half-believing, that he
was in earnest.
Josiah Cornthwaite, always accessible to flattery on the matter of
“the works,” as the artful Theodore knew, suffered himself to smile a
little as he turned to Claire.
“And so you have to be sacrificed, and must consent to be bored to
please papa?”
“Oh, I shan’t be bored. I shall like it,” said Claire.
She spoke in a little thread of a musical, almost childish, voice, and
very shyly. But as she did so, uttering only these simple words, a
great change took place in her. Before she spoke no one would have
said more of her than that she was a quiet, modest-looking, perhaps
rather insignificant, little girl, and that her gray frock was neat and
well-fitting.
But no sooner did she open her mouth to speak or to smile than the
little olive-skinned face broke into all sorts of pretty dimples. The
black eyes made up for what they lacked in size by their sparkle and
brilliancy, and the two rows of little ivory teeth helped the dazzling
effect.
Then Claire Biron was charming. Then even Josiah Cornthwaite
forgot to ask himself whether she was not cunning. Then Chris
stroked his mustache, and told himself with complacency that he had
done a good deed in standing up for the poor, little thing.
But rough Bram Elshaw, whom Chris had beckoned to come
forward, and who stood respectfully in the background, waiting to
know for what he was wanted, felt as if he had received an electric
shock.
Bram was held very unsusceptible to feminine influences. He was
what the factory and shop lasses of the town called a hard nut to
crack, a close-fisted customer, and other terms of a like opprobrious
nature. Occupied with his books, those everlasting books, and with
his vague dreams of something indefinite and as yet far out of his
reach, he had, at this ripe age of twenty, looked down upon such
members of the frivolous sex as came in his way, and dreamed of
something fairer in the shape of womanhood, something to which a
pretty young actress whom he had seen at one of the theatres in the
part of “Lady Betty Noel,” had given more definite form.
And now quite suddenly, in the broad light of an August morning,
with nothing more romantic than the rolling mill for a background,
there had broken in upon his startled imagination the creature the
sight of whom he seemed to have been waiting for. As he stood
there motionless, his eyes riveted, his ears tingling with the very
sound of her voice, he felt that a revelation had been made to him.
As if revealed in one magnetic flash, he saw in a moment what it was
that woman meant to man; saw the attraction that the rough lads of
his acquaintance found in the slovenly, noisy girls of their own courts
and alleys; stood transfixed, coarse-handed son of toil that he was,
under the spell of love.
The voice of Chris Cornthwaite close to his ear startled him out of a
stupor of intoxication.
“What’s the matter with you, Bram? You look as if you’d been struck
by lightning. You are to go round the works with Miss Biron and
explain things, you know. And listen” (he might well have to recall
Bram’s wandering attention, for this command had thrown the lad
into a sort of frenzy, on which he found it difficult enough to suppress
all outward signs), “I have something much more important to tell
you than that.” But Bram’s face was a blank. “You are to come up to
the Park next Thursday evening, and I think you’ll find my father has
something to say to you that you’ll be glad to hear. And mind this,
Bram, it was I who put him up to it. It’s me you’ve got to thank.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Bram, touching his cap respectfully, and trying
to speak as if he felt grateful.
But he was not. He felt no emotion whatever. He was stupefied by
the knowledge that he was to go round the works with Miss Biron.