men as on his wife. To gain his point he must
take only one step at a time, and it seemed to him that the first thing
needed at Westmore was that the hands should work and live under
healthier conditions. To attain this, two important changes were
necessary: the floor-space of the mills must be enlarged, and the
company must cease to rent out tenements, and give the operatives the
opportunity to buy land for themselves. Both these changes involved the
upheaval of the existing order. Whenever the Westmore mills had been
enlarged, it had been for the sole purpose of increasing the revenues of
the company; and now Amherst asked that these revenues should be
materially and permanently reduced. As to the suppression of the company
tenement, such a measure struck at the roots of the baneful paternalism
which was choking out every germ of initiative in the workman. Once the
operatives had room to work in, and the hope of homes of their own to
go to when work was over, Amherst was willing to trust to time for the
satisfaction of their other needs. He believed that a sounder
understanding of these needs would develop on both sides the moment the
employers proved their good faith by the deliberate and permanent
sacrifice of excessive gain to the well-being of the employed; and once
the two had learned to regard each other not as antagonists but as
collaborators, a long step would have been taken toward a readjustment
of the whole industrial relation. In regard to general and distant
results, Amherst tried not to be too sanguine, even in his own thoughts.
His aim was to remedy the abuse nearest at hand, in the hope of thus
getting gradually closer to the central evil; and, had his action been
unhampered, he would still have preferred the longer and more circuitous
path of practical experiment to the sweeping adoption of a new
industrial system.

But his demands, moderate as they were, assumed in his hearers the
consciousness of a moral claim superior to the obligation of making
one's business "pay"; and it was the futility of this assumption that
chilled the arguments on his lips, since in the orthodox creed of the
business world it was a weakness and not a strength to be content with
five per cent where ten was obtainable. Business was one thing,
philanthropy another; and the enthusiasts who tried combining them were
usually reduced, after a brief flight, to paying fifty cents on the
dollar, and handing over their stock to a pro