Allowing for school and university, he wouldn’t come to it for another six years yet, and by then he ought to be better equipped for a rebellion. But--the infernal cunning of this sixteenth-birthday initiation--it would be too late then. From to-day, if he let the day pass without protest, he wore the chains of slavery, he was doomed, marked down for sacrifice, and he was so young! He resented the unfairness of his youth pitted in unequal conflict with his father. “One last tradition of the Hepplestalls, Rupert,” Sir Philip said as they returned to his office, “though I expect you’re hating the word ‘tradition.’” Oh, did his father understand everything and forestall it? “The eldest sons have not come to it easily. Sometimes there’s been open refusal. There’ve been ugly rows. There’s always been a feeling on the son’s part that the terms of service were too harsh. Well, I have come to know that they are necessary terms. We are masters of men, and we gain mastery of ourselves in those days when we learn our trade by the side of the tradesmen. We cannot take this great place of ours lightly, not Hepplestall’s, not the heavy trust that is laid upon us. We cannot risk the failure of a Hepplestall through lack of knowledge of his trade or through personal indiscipline. Imagination, the gifts of leadership are things we cannot give you here; either you have them in you or you will never have them, and it is reasonable to think you have them. They have seemed to be the birthright of a Hepplestall. But we can train you to their use. “There is that Japanese ideal of the Samurai. I don’t think that it is absent from our English life, but perhaps we have not been very explicit about our ideals. There’s money made here, and if I told some people that what actuates me is not money but the idea of service, I should not be believed. I should be told that I confused Mammon with God: but I am here to serve, and money is inescapable because money is the index of successful service in present day conditions. Service, not money, is the mainspring of the Hepplestalls, the service of England because it is the service of Lancashire. We lead--not exclusively but we are of the leaders--in Lancashire. We are keepers of the cotton trade, trustees of its efficiency, guarantors of its progress. “I am earnest with you, Rupert. Probably I’m offending your sense of decent reticence. Ideals are things to be private about, but let us just for once take the wrappings off them and let us have a look at them.... Well, we’ve looked and we’ll hide them again, but we won’t forget they’re there. I suppose we keep a shop, but the soul of the shopkeepers isn’t in the cash-register.”