He did not suppose it for long. You can spring surprises on human nature, you can de-humanize it for a time, but if you put faith in the permanent enslavement of men and women, you shall find yourself mistaken. Even while John was passing from a wretched childhood to a wretched adolescence, the reaction was preparing, and mutely, hardly consciously at all, he was questioning if the things that were, were necessarily the things that had to be. There was the death of Peter, in the factory, stopping to live as a machine stops functioning because it is worn out, and there was the drop in their family wages, though John was earning man’s pay then. And there was the human stir in the world, the efforts of workers to combine for better conditions, for Trade Unions, for Reformed Parliaments, and the efforts of the ruling classes, qualified by the liberalism of a Peel or the insurgency of a Cobbett, to repress. There were riots, machine-breaking, factory-burning, Peterloo, the end of a great war, peace and disbanded soldiery, people who starved and a panic-stricken Home Secretary who thought there was a revolution. Most of it mattered very little to John, growing up in Hepplestall’s factory, which escaped riot. It escaped not because its conditions were not terrible but because conditions were often more terrible. As employer, Reuben trod the middle way, and it was the extreme men, the brutes who seemed to glory in brutality, at whom riots were aimed. John knew that there were blacker hells than his, which was a sort of mitigation, while mere habit was another. If life has never been anything but miserable, than misery is life, and you make the best of it. One of the ways by which John expected to make the best of it was to marry. He married at seventeen, but when it is in the scheme of things to be senile at forty, seventeen is a mature age. The family wage was also in the scheme of things: the exploitation of children was the basis of the cotton trade: and though love laughs at economics as heartily as at locksmiths, marriage and child-bearing were not discouraged by misery, but encouraged by it. John did not think of these things, nor of himself and Annie as potential providers of child-slaves. He thought, illogically, of being happy.