That, and worse, was the early life of John Bradshaw, son of Reuben Hepplestall. Peter went into Reuben’s factory: he took the meatless bone Reuben contemptuously threw to a dog: he became an overlooker. Once he had been a fighter, when he was raising himself from the ranks into the position of a small factory owner: then contentment had come upon him and fighting power went out of him. Whom, indeed, should he fight? He was not encountering a man but a Thing, a System, which at its first onslaught seemed to crush the spirit of a people. The later Hepplestalls looked back to Reuben, their founder, and saw him as a figure of romance. The romance of Lancashire is rather in the tremendous fact that its common people survived this System that came upon them from the unknown, that, so soon, they were hitting back at the Thing which stifled life. Capital, unaggravated, had been tolerable; capital, aggravated by steam, made the Factory System and the System was intolerable. Reuben might have chosen to make exceptions of the Bradshaws, but he did not choose it. They had to be nothing to the husband of Dorothy Hepplestall, they had to go, with the rest, into the jaws of the System. So Peter lost his liberties and found nothing in the steam machines to parallel the easy-going familiarities between master and man which had humanized his primitive factory. A bell summoned him into the factory, and he left it when the engines stopped, which might be twelve and a half or might be fifteen hours later. He gave good work for bad pay and his prayer was that the worst might not happen. The worst was that Phoebe might be driven with him into the factory, and the worst beyond the worst was that Phoebe’s son might be driven with her. So he gave of his best and tried with a beaten man’s despair to hold off the worst results of the creeping ruin that came upon his home.