Changes at Milton

Then one man draws another aside,
and walks a little apart, and, with head inclined into his
neighbour's ear, he says, 'Thornton's business is large; but he
has spent his profits in extending it; he has no capital laid by;
his machinery is new within these two years, and has cost him--we
won't say what!--a word to the wise!' But that Mr. Harrison was a
croaker,--a man who had succeeded to his father's trade-made
fortune, which he had feared to lose by altering his mode of
business to any having a larger scope; yet he grudged every penny
made by others more daring and far-sighted.

But the truth was, Mr. Thornton was hard pressed. He felt it
acutely in his vulnerable point--his pride in the commercial
character which he had established for himself. Architect of his
own fortunes, he attributed this to no special merit or qualities
of his own, but to the power, which he believed that commerce
gave to every brave, honest, and persevering man, to raise
himself to a level from which he might see and read the great
game of worldly success, and honestly, by such far-sightedness,
command more power and influence than in any other mode of life.
Far away, in the East and in the West, where his person would
never be known, his name was to be regarded, and his wishes to be
fulfilled, and his word pass like gold. That was the idea of
merchant-life with which Mr. Thornton had started. 'Her merchants
be like princes,' said his mother, reading the text aloud, as if
it were a trumpet-call to invite her boy to the struggle. He was
but like many others--men, women, and children--alive to distant,
and dead to near things. He sought to possess the influence of a
name in foreign countries and far-away seas,--to become the head
of a firm that should be known for generations; and it had taken
him long silent years to come even to a glimmering of what he
might be now, to-day, here in his own town, his own factory,
among his own people. He and they had led parallel lives--very
close, but never touching--till the accident (or so it seemed) of
his acquaintance with Higgins. Once brought face to face, man to
man, with an individual of the masses around him, and (take
notice) out of the character of master and workman, in the first
instance, they had each begun to recognise that 'we have all of
us one human heart.' It was the fine point of the wedge; and
until now, when the apprehension of losing his connection with
two or three of the workmen whom he had so lately begun to know
as men,--of having a plan or two, which were experiments lying
very close to his heart, roughly nipped off without trial,--gave
a new poignancy to the subtle fear that came over him from time
to time; until now, he had never recognised how much and how deep
was the interest he had grown of late to feel in his position as
manufacturer, simply because it led him into such close contact,
and gave him the opportunity of so much power, among a race of
people strange, shrewd, ignorant; but, above all, full of
character and strong human feeling.