"We aren't going to be capitalists at all. I'm just going to start the concern with my bit of a fortune--it doesn't look so much of a fortune as it did, now I know what a little way it will go. But any way Ben and I are going to work in it, side by side with the hands. We are all going to be hands together. Of course, in a sense, there'll be a master; but he will be a master in a different sense from what we're all used to. Every one of us that can do a full man's work is to have an equal share in the profit, always provided he does the work he is capable of. There will be shorter hours and less work for the youngsters. But the share of all will depend on the profits we make, and no one is to have a greater share than another." "But that seems ridiculous, Tom. If you are to turn manufacturer like my uncle, why, you must be a manufacturer. You will have to go to market as he does, and meet and bargain with your customers, to dress like them, to mix with them as an equal. How can you do that on the lines you are laying down? I am only a silly girl, may be, and certainly I don't know much about business, but go on,--this grows interesting." "I know the difficulties, Miss Dorothy, but the difficulty will not be in Ben, and I hope not in me. The difficulty will be in getting a sufficient number of men, capable, reliable, sober, industrious men who can be brought to see that in our scheme there will not only be an escape from the thraldom of the capital they denounce so hotly, but a realization of that equality and fraternity for which men and women have gone to their graves like bed. The difficulty will be to persuade men not merely that they will be better off themselves, but that they must be content to take part of their wage in seeing a worse workman than themselves better off too. Labour is just as selfish as capital. But in our mill no matter what a man's allotted task, so long as he does his work faithfully, he shall share and share alike." "But that seems just a little absurd, don't you think?" asked Dorothy, now genuinely interested. "You must make all this clear to me. You don't mean to say that if you, say, are the designer or the traveller, you are to draw no more profit out of the concern than a teamer?"