Laments of a Fortunate Man

            My childhood is pastel memories in the gardens of Lowes, dashing around on that crisp blue-green grass, yet avoiding ruining the flowers, whose delightful fragrance never relaxed its grasp on my remembrance.  My relentless spirit relished only at the sight of the captivating sunsets blazing over that pleasant town, which still lives and blossoms near the south coast of Britain.  The settlement was home to my grandparents, with whom I lived, and I often enjoyed the hearty meals that my family unfailingly prepared for my four brothers and me.  I was content then, not preoccupying about what the uncertainties of the future concealed from my sight.

            I came to this world in 1801, and my story, I know assuredly, resembles and parallels the lives of innumerable men who will inevitably come to my state of helpless anguish.  My name, thus, bears no importance per se.  Contrastingly, I feel the overpowering necessity to divulgate the narration of my questionable behaviour, and I hereby extend the responsibility to judge me to men and to God.  Shortly after we celebrated my nineteenth birthday, the official news reached my father that his brother had left the living, and that we were to move to Manchester, by then a blooming site, to administer my deceased uncle’s former properties.  He owned a fair textile plant that had paid him enough to obtain the newest inventions for faster weaving.  My father directed the workshop for seven years, during which I became familiar with the trade, wealth, and the life as a prosperous merchant in the city.  At the end of the seven years, a swift pneumonia left the plant headless, and I, being the oldest of my family then, assumed control of what rightfully belonged to me.

            Precisely then, I believe now, I opened Pandora’s Box by attempting to govern an entity that, in the obnubilation that resulted from my ignorant pride, I could not understand.  For the first time, I entered those social circles that the wealthy formed to justify (or at least forget) the penuries of their labourers.  Their labourers.  They commonly referred to the weavers, whose life force they converted into gold, as theirs; most often, I would rejoice, too, at the sole thought of sitting there, conversing and partying and drinking champagne, while the workers at the factory strived for one more day of existence.  Mundane pleasures and earthly easiness seduced me, and I took myself to a life of serene opulence, the same life that I now despise.

            Somehow, I never sought equanimity between my subordinates and me; now I comprehend my views at the time, but I do not justify or sanction them.  From the beginning of my rule, I intended to obtain the greatest possible profit out of the factory.  I duplicated the existing number of spinning Jennies in the facility, and I increased the labour hours to fourteen.  My actions, I must say, did result effective.  However, I realised after a few months that children, emaciated as they already were, would eventually perish under so harsh a schedule.  In a display of forged kindness, I reduced daily hours to twelve for children under ten years of age.  I felt compelled to proceed in this manner for a reason that originated, naturally, in my avarice:  I could not afford to lose such an obedient, yet inexpensive, sector of the workers.

            I always hired children, knowing that their diluted innocence would maintain them under my command; with them, I could not foresee an argument.  One, however, broke the norm upon which peaceful production was based.  His name was Peter, but everyone in the plant called him Little Pete.  Little Pete normally behaved in an exemplary manner; he was only ten years old, but he constituted an example of discipline and assiduousness even for the young adults in the factory.  The situation of his family overwhelmed him, and, during the almost eighteen months that he worked for me, he undertook every available task with the idealistic determination that he would some day take his family out of its destituteness.  I knew of this, and I paid him a meagre salary, with the scornful assurance that he would work all else notwithstanding.  I enjoyed order and feared change, so the policies of the company were enforced by the use of the skin-splitting whip.  I selected persons for work enforcement based on their mercilessness, for, I thought, no coward should hold the position.  I heartily abhorred cowards, and perhaps I occasionally shivered at the thought of being one.

            By that time ran the winter of 1848.  December struck us as it always does, but it appeared to undermine the capabilities of my workers severely.  While the machines tirelessly sputtered their venomous spores in the background, the men fell prey to the tremendous, merciless cold. The epitome was Little Pete.  He evidently suffered from a problem related to his respiratory tract, and, consequently, the quality of his daily performance in the workshop decreased drastically.  I committed the largest mistake of my life then, towards the last days of the year.  As a result of his illness, Little Pete simply could not keep up with his work.  One of the supervisors that I so blindly selected noticed that Little Pete was not transporting boxes of textiles from one station to the next one as his task required, but instead breathed heavily sitting on a small wooden bench.  He nonchalantly whipped Little Pete once, and the forsaken child jumped out of his seat at once to resume his duty.  His father, however, considered it horridly vicious to chastise a sick and withered and feeble boy.  With a fury that he had not displayed before, Pete’s father rushed towards the guard, yelled something, and struck him powerfully in the face.  The other guards separated the two men, gripping the helpless father tightly.  The guard that had whipped Pete discovered then that blood was gushing out of his mouth.  At that exact instant, I came in.  I saw my security employee, possessed by his fallen pride, run enraged towards Little Pete, whom fear had paralysed.  He clutched the young, sprouting, industrious child by the neck and flung him directly to the floor.  Then, he stole a rapid glance from the terrified, impotent father, which swiftly ignited the monster’s passion.  Gathering the devil’s might, he strepitously kicked the boy’s back.  I heard his bones cracking; I did not move a finger; I did not say a word.  Little Pete departed to heaven minutes later, amidst muffled shrieks and red convulsions, and before the agonising eyes of his father.  And through the silence, the machines intoned their ominous grinding hymn of the progress of man.

            I permanently overworked the labourers, just as many other wealthy merchants, whom I happened to know, did.  In my present awareness, I understand without question the workers’ actions in 1849, and, furthermore, I cannot see why the natural course of events delayed so much.  Perhaps only after Little Pete’s death did they see the overt inequity that prevails in the world, because I did not expiate my debt to that child and his family in any manner.  It was an accursed day of 1849 when the strike was born.  All the workers of the factory ceased fulfilling their tasks on the hopes, however dreary, that I would acquiesce to their just demands.  They wanted to work only twelve hours a day, and they requested two lunch periods.  I ludicrously saw myself as their benefactor, and I considered the strike to represent the act of biting the hand that fed them.  On my darkest hours, I decided that only severe castigation would remind them of their position relative to me.  I called the police to restore public order.  As a result, most of my workers were massacred, because the British government desired to prevent any subsequent upheavals in the region.  I never contemplated such desolation; the sepulchral picture of the scarlet blanket lain on my grounds, the omnipresent cadavers, and the cries of despair of the relatives who survived, have accompanied me to the bed on which I now lie dying.

            I perceive myself approaching my fatal hour, the blessed moment when I will no longer need to bear my conscience.  I have since the strike renounced to the factory, and, confining myself to the four walls that conceal the evil within me from the rest of the world, I have read.  I have read Adam Smith’s wealth of nations, and about the financial progress attained by economic liberty, and I infer he referred to the healthy wages that the labour at my factory earned.  Disgraceful.  I have studied the thoughts of two German philosophers and their candid presupposition that economic struggles alone shape society.  No one will ever believe in their arguments, I dare prognosticate.  Not to my surprise, yet not to my pleasure, all of those renowned philosophers fail to see the truth, the ultimate truth that I beheld when my tormented conscience forced me, as one of its many means of torture, to comprehend that I was once not different from Little Pete, who committed the single crime in his life of not having an affluent uncle, of being born with all his worth in his heart, none in his wallet.  Now I am ill and old and weary of life, and I am departing.  This is my story; let God judge me, for I stopped praying for an absolution too long ago.

April 2001