The store-house reeked with that fat, heavy odour peculiar to hemp and flax.  It was a lofty building of wide doors and few windows.  Here in the gloom lay bales and stacks of raw material.  Italy, Russia, India, had sent their scutched hemp and tow to Bridetown.  Some was in the rough; the dressed line had already been hackled and waited in bundles of long hemp composed of wisps, or ‘stricks’ like horses’ tails.  The silver and amber of the material made flashes of brightness in the dark storerooms and drew the light to their shining surfaces.  Tall, brown posts supported the rafters, and in the twilight that reigned here, a man moved among the bales piled roof-high around him.  He was gathering rough tow from a broken bale of Russian hemp and had stripped the Archangel matting from the mass.

Levi Baggs, the hackler, proceeded presently to weigh his material and was taking it over the bridge to the hackling shop when he met John Best, the foreman.  They stopped to speak, and Levi set down the barrow that bore his load.

“I see you with him, yesterday.  Did you get any ideas out of the man?”

Baggs referred to the new master and John Best understood.

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” he said.  “Nothing definite, of course.  It’s too soon to talk of changes, even if Mister Daniel means them.  He’ll carry on as before for the present, and think twice and again before he does anything different from his father.”

“’Tis just Bridetown luck if he’s the sort to keep at a dead parent’s apron-strings,” grumbled the other.  “Nowadays, what with education and so on, the rising generation is generally ahead of the last and moves according.”

“You can move two ways—­backward as well as forward,” answered Best.  “Better he should go on as we’ve been going, than go back.”

“He daren’t go back—­the times won’t let him.  The welfare of the workers is the first demand on capital nowadays.  If it weren’t, labour would very soon know the reason why.”

Mr. Best regarded Levi without admiration.

“You are a grumbler born,” he said, “and so fond of it that you squeal before you’re hurt, just for the pleasure of squealing.  One thing I can tell you, for Mister Daniel said it in so many words:  he’s the same in politics as his father; and that’s Liberal; and since the Liberals of yesterday are the Radicals of to-morrow, we have every reason to suppose he’ll move with the times.”

“We all know what that means,” answered Mr. Baggs.  “It means getting new machinery and increasing the output of the works for the benefit of the owners, not them that run the show.  I don’t set no store on a man being a Radical nowadays.  You can’t trust nobody under a Socialist.”

Mr. Best laughed.

“You wait till they’ve got the power, and you’ll find that the whip will fall just as heavy from their hands as the masters of to-day.  Better to get small money and be free, than get more and go a slave in state clothes, on state food, in a state house, with a state slave-driver to see you earn your state keep and take your state holidays when the state wills, and work as much or as little as the state pleases.  What you chaps call ‘liberty’ you’ll find is something quite different, Baggs, for it means good-bye to privacy in the home and independence outside it.”