Chapter 18

Once started in his career of active benevolence, the colonel's natural love of thoroughness, combined with a philanthropic zeal as pleasant as it was novel, sought out new reforms. They were easily found. He had begun, with wise foresight, at the foundations of prosperity, by planning an industry in which the people could find employment. But there were subtler needs, mental and spiritual, to be met. Education, for instance, so important to real development, languished in Clarendon. There was a select private school for young ladies, attended by the daughters of those who could not send their children away to school. A few of the town boys went away to military schools. The remainder of the white youth attended the academy, which was a thoroughly democratic institution, deriving its support partly from the public school fund and partly from private subscriptions. There was a coloured public school taught by a Negro teacher. Neither school had, so far as the colonel could learn, attained any very high degree of efficiency. At one time the colonel had contemplated building a schoolhouse for the children of the mill hands, but upon second thought decided that the expenditure would be more widely useful if made through the channels already established. If the old academy building were repaired, and a wing constructed, for which there was ample room upon the grounds, it would furnish any needed additional accommodation for the children of the operatives, and avoid the drawing of any line that might seem to put these in a class apart. There were already lines enough in the town--the deep and distinct colour line, theoretically all-pervasive, but with occasional curious exceptions; the old line between the "rich white folks" or aristocrats--no longer rich, most of them, but retaining some of their former wealth and clinging tenaciously to a waning prestige--and the "poor whites," still at a social disadvantage, but gradually evolving a solid middle class, with reinforcements from the decaying aristocracy, and producing now and then some ambitious and successful man like Fetters. To emphasise these distinctions was no part of the colonel's plan. To eradicate them entirely in any stated time was of course impossible, human nature being what it was, but he would do nothing to accentuate them. His mill hands should become, like the mill hands in New England towns, an intelligent, self-respecting and therefore respected element of an enlightened population; and the whole town should share equally in anything he might spend for their benefit.

He found much pleasure in talking over these fine plans of his with Laura Treadwell. Caxton had entered into them with the enthusiasm of an impressionable young man, brought into close contact with a forceful personality. But in Miss Laura the colonel found a sympathy that was more than intellectual--that reached down to sources of spiritual strength and inspiration which the colonel