There had been growls of dissatisfaction, sneers of scepticism, tacit defiance in the mill and the bakehouse, which had all passed unheeded by Oliver, before the storm broke forth. It began with a comparatively trifling _émeute_ in the mill after the miller’s men had been comparing notes with the journeymen bakers who went far before the grinders of the raw grain in crude, shallow quickness of reasoning and one-sided, undigested knowledge. The journeymen bakers first crammed the young millers with the rank growth of their supposed grievances, and then adroitly pushed the crammed men before them, into the breach, to open the battle with Oliver their common enemy. There were long-standing usages and privileges in the miller and baker trades which Oliver had thought fit to abolish without asking the consent of his servants farther than in the address which he delivered on entering into possession of the mill and the shop, and that lay beyond the comprehension of the cleverest man among them, who immediately made up his mind that it was all ‘soft sawder’ and ‘book-learning bosh.’ The men chose to regard these time-out-of-mind customs and liberties, though they had no direct bearing on any miller’s or baker’s prosperity, and were even sometimes prejudicial to fair play among the men themselves, as their rules to which they had agreed on entering their trades. No master had any right to interfere with and overturn these rules without the men’s concurrence; above all, they were not such fools as to be defrauded of them by a fine assumption of philanthropy on the part of their antagonist. Oliver discovered that there had been disobedience and evasion of a regulation which he had laid down at the Mill, that two different qualities of grain, whether coming from the same or different owners, should not from that time forward be so taken and ground together as to produce a spurious average of quality, even when that average might be accepted with ignorant or indifferent acquiescence in the case of the better as well as the worse wheat. ‘Why did you not attend to what I said, Green?’ enquired Oliver angrily. ‘Mind that this lumping together does not occur again. At the best it is a slovenly, inaccurate makeshift for clean, correct work, which prevents a proper estimate of each quality of grain and adulterates flour at the mill; at the worst it is an imposition and a cheat, hiding careless negligence on our part, or consenting to withdraw the surplus fineness and cleanness of one man’s growth of corn in order to add it to the deficient worth of another man’s crop. I will not have it.’