 wagons, each one bearing in
big white letters the initials:
    »C.B. &amp; Co.«
    These white letters on all the wagons he had seen since his first childhood,
and it was as if he had never seen them, they were so familiar, and so ignored.
Now at last he saw his own name written on the wall. Now he had a vision of
power.
    So many wagons, bearing his initial, running all over the country. He saw
them as he entered London in the train, he saw them at Dover. So far his power
ramified. He looked at Beldover, at Selby, at Whatmore, at Lethley Bank, the
great colliery villages which depended entirely on his mines. They were hideous
and sordid, during his childhood they had been sores in his consciousness. And
now he saw them with pride. Four raw new towns, and many ugly industrial hamlets
were crowded under his dependence. He saw the stream of miners flowing along the
causeways from the mines at the end of the afternoon, thousands of blackened,
slightly distorted human beings with red mouths, all moving subjugate to his
will. He pushed slowly in his motor-car through the little market-top on Friday
nights in Beldover, through a solid mass of human beings that were making their
purchases and doing their weekly spending. They were all subordinate to him.
They were ugly and uncouth, but they were his instruments. He was the God of the
machine. They made way for his motorcar automatically, slowly.
    He did not care whether they made way with alacrity, or grudgingly. He did
not care what they thought of him. His vision had suddenly crystallised.
Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of mankind. There had been so
much humanitarianism, so much talk of sufferings and feelings. It was
ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not matter in the
least. They were mere conditions, like the weather. What mattered was the pure
instrumentality of the individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well?
Nothing else mattered.
    Everything in the world has its function, and is good or not good in so far
as it fulfils this function more or less perfectly. Was a miner a good miner?
Then he was complete. Was a manager a good manager? That was enough. Gerald
himself, who was responsible for all this industry, was he a good director? If
he were, he had fulfilled his life. The rest was by-play.
    The mines were there, they were old. They were giving
