Now matters were so arranged at Co-op Mill that self interest was necessarily and unavoidably altruistic, and when this great truth was once fairly grasped and assimilated by the hands a spirit prevailed from scouring house to pressing-room that secured ready, willing abundant and thorough work, and the quality and the quantity of the work soon made themselves manifest in the final output. The finished pieces were a delight to the eye and to the touch. There was no occasion to employ a traveller to push their goods. The goods sold themselves. It had been resolved that suit-lengths might be bought at the mill at a little below ordinary retail prices. This was to contravene the commercial code; but Tom did not see why a man should be compelled to go to a tailor and the tailor to a merchant and pay the profits to two middlemen because of a commercial code that chiefly benefited the middlemen and never the consumer. No, the difficulty did not consist in finding purchasers; the difficulty was in putting out goods enough to supply the demand. But as Ben had predicted, so soon as the system began to be understood, and especially after the first "divvy" had been declared and actually taken home by the men and handed to their wives, there was no lack of proffers of service from men who were able, ready, and willing to put their "bit" into Co-op Mill. At present there was some demur to terms--bare interest on invested capital, no participation in profits over that limit. On this point Ben and Tom were inexorable, adamantine. "It shall _not_ be a capitalists' concern, it _shall_ be a workers'." And it was wonderful too, and heartening to note the harmony, the goodwill, the general sense of brotherhood that prevailed from counting-house downwards. There was no cringing, no toadying, no tale-hearing. There was the very presence, spirit, and revelation of a moral resolution. Nothing so ennobles a man as to feel that, so far as man can ever be in this network of human organism in which no thread is self-sufficient and self-dependent, he is his own man, with need to go cap in hand to no other. It is a feeling that, in Yorkshire is perhaps apt to run to truculence and the very savagery of self-assertion; but even so it is better than the cringing, fawning self-abasement of the rural districts of the midland villages where squire and priest are gods of earth and heaven.