And the men had been benefited in their
fashion. There were few poor, and few needy. All was plenty, because
the mines were good and easy to work. And the miners, in those days,
finding themselves richer than they might have expected, felt glad and
triumphant. They thought themselves well-off, they congratulated
themselves on their good-fortune, they remembered how their fathers had
starved and suffered, and they felt that better times had come. They
were grateful to those others, the pioneers, the new owners, who had
opened out the pits, and let forth this stream of plenty.
But man is never satisfied, and so the miners, from gratitude to their
owners, passed on to murmuring. Their sufficiency decreased with
knowledge, they wanted more. Why should the master be so
out-of-all-proportion rich?
There was a crisis when Gerald was a boy, when the Masters' Federation
closed down the mines because the men would not accept a reduction.
This lock-out had forced home the new conditions to Thomas Crich.
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