"
John Ball laughed. "Great is my harvest of riddles to-night," said
he; "for even if a man sleep not, and eat and drink while he is
a-working, ye shall but make two men, or three at the most, out of
him."
Said I: "Sawest thou ever a weaver at his loom?"
"Yea," said he, "many a time."
He was silent a little, and then said: "Yet I marvelled not at it;
but now I marvel, because I know what thou wouldst say. Time was when
the shuttle was thrust in and out of all the thousand threads of the
warp, and it was long to do; but now the spring-staves go up and down
as the man's feet move, and this and that leaf of the warp cometh
forward and the shuttle goeth in one shot through all the thousand
warps. Yea, so it is that this multiplieth a man many times. But
look you, he is so multiplied already; and so hath he been, meseemeth,
for many hundred years."
"Yea," said I, "but what hitherto needed the masters to multiply him
more? For many hundred years the workman was a thrall bought and sold
at the cross; and for other hundreds of years he hath been a villein--
that is, a working-beast and a part of the stock of the manor on which
he liveth; but then thou and the like of thee shall free him, and then
is mastership put to its shifts; for what should avail the mastery
then, when the master no longer owneth the man by law as his chattel,
nor any longer by law owneth him as stock of his land, if the master
hath not that which he on whom he liveth may not lack and live withal,
and cannot have without selling himself?"
He said nothing, but I saw his brow knitted and his lips pressed
together as though in anger; and again I said:
"Thou hast seen the weaver at his loom: think how it should be if he
sit no longer before the web and cast the shuttle and draw home the
sley, but if the shed open of itself and the shuttle of itself speed
through it as swift as the eye can follow, and the sley come home of
itself; and the weaver standing by and whistling The Hunt's Up! the
while, or looking to half-a-dozen looms and bidding them what to do.
Pages:
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123