The Paper Cap. A Story of Love and Labor

“ ‘Off with your labor cap! rush to the van!
The sword is your tool, and the height of your plan
Is to turn yoursen into a fighting man.’

“Lads, I niver was much on poetry but when I was a varry young man, I learned eleven lines that hev helped me in many hours of trial and temptation to remember that I was an English gentleman, and so bound by birth and honor to behave like one.”

“Will tha say them eleven lines to us, squire? Happen they might help us a bit, too.”

“I am sure of it, Jonathan.” With these words, the kind-hearted, scrupulously honorable gentleman lifted his hat, and as he did so, fifty paper caps were lifted as if by one hand and the men who wore them rose as one man.

“You may keep your standing, lads, the eleven lines are worthy of that honor; and then in a proud, glad enthusiasm, the squire repeated them with such a tone of love and such a grandeur of diction and expression as no words can represent: —

“This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-Paradise;
This fortress built by Nature for herself,
Against infection, and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall —
Or as a moat defensive to a house —
Against the envy of less happier lands.
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England!”

And the orator and his audience were all nearer crying than they knew, for it was pride and love that made their hearts beat so high and their eyes overflow with happy tears. The room felt as if it was on fire, and every man that hour knew that Patriotism is one of the holiest sentiments of the soul. With lifted caps, they went away in the stillness of that happiness, which the language of earth has not one word to represent.

CHAPTER XIV – A RECALL

AFTER this event I never saw Squire Antony Annis any more. Within a week, I had left the place, and I was not there again until the year A. D. 1884, a period of fifty-one years. Yet the lovely village was clear enough in my memory. I approached it by one of the railroads boring their way through the hills and valleys surrounding the place, and as I did so, I recalled vividly its pretty primitive cottages – each one set in its own garden of herbs and flowers. I could hear the clattering of the looms in the loom sheds attached to most of these dwellings. I could see the handsome women with their large, rosy families, and the burly men standing in groups discussing some recent sermon, or horse race, or walking with their sweethearts; and perhaps singing “The Lily of the Valley,” or “There is a Land of Pure Delight!” I could hear or see the children laughing or quarreling, or busy with their bobbins at the spinning wheel, and I could even follow every note of the melody the old church chimes were flinging into the clear, sweet atmosphere above me.

In reality, I had no hopes of seeing or hearing any of these things again, and the nearer I approached Annis Railroad Station, the more surely I was aware that my expectation of disappointment was a certain presage. I found the once lovely village a large town, noisy and dirty and full of red mills. There were whole streets of them, their lofty walls pierced with more windows than there are days in a year, and their enormously high chimneys shutting out the horizon as with a wall. The street that had once overlooked the clear fast-running river was jammed with mills, the river had become foul and black with the refuse of dyeing materials and other necessities of mill labor.

The village had totally disappeared. In whatever direction I looked there was nothing but high brick mills, with enormously lofty chimneys lifted up into the smoky atmosphere. However, as my visit was in the winter, I had many opportunities of seeing these hundreds and thousands of mill windows lit up in the early mornings and in the twilight of the autumn evenings. It was a marvelous and unforget-able sight. Nothing could make commonplace this sudden, silent, swift appearance of light from the myriad of windows, up the hills, and down the hills, through the valleys, and following the river, and lighting up the wolds, every morning and every evening, just for the interval of dawning and twilight. As a spectacle it is indescribable; there is no human vocabulary has a word worthy of it.

The operatives were as much changed as the place. All traces of that feudal loyalty which had existed between Squire Annis and his weavers, had gone forever, with home and hand-labor, and individual bargaining. The power-loom weaver was even then the most independent of all workers. And men, women and children were well educated, for among the first bills passed by Parliament after the Reform Bill was one founding National schools over the length and breadth of England; and the third generation since was then entering them. “Now that you have given the people the vote,” said Lord Brougham, “you must educate them. The men who say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to England’s national problems must be able to read all about them.” So National Schools followed The Bill, and I found in Annis a large Public Library, young men’s Debating Societies, and courses of lectures, literary and scientific.

On the following Sunday night, I went to the Methodist chapel. The old one had disappeared, but a large handsome building stood on its site. The moment I entered it, I was met by the cheerful Methodist welcome and because I was a stranger I was taken to the Preacher’s pew. Someone was playing a voluntary, on an exceptionally fine organ, and in the midst of a pathetic minor passage – which made me feel as if I had just lost Eden over again – there was a movement, and with transfigured faces the whole congregation rose to its feet and began to sing. The voluntary had slipped into the grand psalm tune called “Olivet” and a thousand men and women, a thousand West Riding voices, married the grand old Psalm tune to words equally grand —

“Lo! He comes with clouds descending,
Once for favored sinners slain;
Thousand, thousand saints attending,
Swell the triumph of his train.
Halleluiah!
God appears on the earth to reign.
“Yea, Amen! let all adore thee,
High on Thy eternal throne;
Savior, take the power and glory!
Claim the kingdom for Thine own.
Halleluiah!
Everlasting God come down!”

And at this hour I am right glad, because my memory recalls that wonderful congregational singing; even as I write the words, I hear it. It was not Emotionalism. No, indeed! It was a good habit of the soul.

The next morning I took an early train to the cathedral city of Ripon, and every street I passed through on my way to the North-Western Station was full of mills. You could not escape the rattle of their machinery, nor the plunging of the greasy piston rods at every window. It was not yet eight o’clock, but the station was crowded with men carrying samples of every kind of wool or cotton. They were neighbors, and often friends, but they took no notice of each other. They were on business, and their hands were full of bundles. So full that I saw several men who could not manage their railway ticket, and let the conductor take it from their teeth.

Now when I travel, I like to talk with my company, but as I looked around, I could not persuade myself that any of these business-saturated men would condescend to converse with an inquisitive woman. However, a little further on, a very complete clergyman came into my compartment. He looked at me inquiringly, and I felt sure he was speculating about my social position. So I hastened to put him at ease, by some inquiries about the Annis family.

“O dear me!” he replied. “So you remember the old Squire Antony! How Time does fly! The Annis people still love and obey Squire Antony. I suppose he is the only person they do love and obey. How long is it since you were here?”

“Over fifty years. I saw the great Reform Bill passed, just before I left Annis in 1833.”

“You mean the first part of it?”

“Well, then, sir, had it more than one part?”

“I should say so. It seemed to need a deal of altering and repairing. The Bill you saw pass was Grey’s bill. It cleaned up the Lords and Commons, and landed gentlemen of England. Thirty-five years later, Derby and Disraeli’s Reform Bill gave the Franchise to the great middle class, mechanics and artizan classes, and this very year Gladstone extended the Bill to take in more than two millions of agricultural and day laborers. It has made a deal of difference with all classes.”

“I think it is quite a coincidence that I should be here at the finish of this long struggle. I have seen the beginning and the end of it. Really quite a coincidence,” and I laughed a little foolish laugh, for the clergyman did not laugh with me. On the contrary he said thoughtfully: “Coincidences come from higher intelligences than ourselves. We cannot control them, but they are generally fortunate.”

“Higher intelligences than ourselves?” I asked. “Yes. This world is both the workfield and the battlefield of those sent to minister unto souls who are to be heirs of salvation, and who perhaps, in their turn, become comforting and helpful spirits to the children of men. Yes. A coincidence is generally a fortunate circumstance. Someone higher than ourselves, has to do with it. Are you an American?”

“I have lived in America for half-a-century.”

“In what part of America?”

“In many parts, north and south and west. My life has been full of changes.”

“Change is good fortune. Yes, it is. To change is to live, and to have changed often, is to have had a perfect life.”

“Do you think the weavers of Annis much improved by all the changes that steam and machinery have brought to them?”

“No. Machinery confers neither moral nor physical perfection, and steam and iron and electricity do not in any way affect the moral nature. Men lived and died before these things were known. They could do so again.”

Here the guard came and unlocked our carriage, and my companion gathered his magazines and newspapers together and the train began to slow up. He turned to me with a smile and said, “Good-by, friend. Go on having changes, and fear not.”

“But if I do fear?”

“Look up, and say:

“O Thou who changest not! Abide with me!”

With these words he went away forever. I had not even asked his name, nor had he asked mine. We were just two wayfarers passing each other on life’s highway. He had brought me a message, and then departed. But there are other worlds beyond this. We had perhaps been introduced for this future. For I do believe that no one touches our life here, who has not some business or right to do so. For our lives before this life and our lives yet to be are all one, separated only by the little sleep we call death.

I reached Ripon just at nightfall, and the quiet of the cathedral city, its closed houses, and peaceful atmosphere, did not please me. After the stress and rush of the West Riding, I thought the place must be asleep. On the third morning I asked myself, “What are you doing here? What has the past to give you? To-day is perhaps yours – Yesterday is as unattainable as To-morrow.” Then the thought of New York stirred me, and I hastened and took the fastest train for Liverpool, and in eight days I had crossed the sea, and was in New York and happily and busily at work again.

But I did not dismiss Annis from my memory and when the first mutterings of the present war was heard, I remembered Squire Antony, and his charge to the weavers of Annis – “It may so happen,” he said, “that in the course of years, some nation, that has lost the grip of all its good senses, will try to invade England. It isn’t likely, but it might be so. Then I say to each of you, and every man of you, without one hour’s delay, do as I have often heard you sing, and say you would do: —

“ ‘Off with your Labor Cap! rush to the van!
The sword for your tool, and the height of your plan
To turn yoursen into a fighting man!