John Huxford's Hiatus

Strange it is and wonderful to mark how upon this planet of ours
the smallest and most insignificant of events set a train of
consequences in motion which act and react until their final
results are portentous and incalculable. Set a force rolling,
however small; and who can say where it shall end, or what it may
lead to! Trifles develop into tragedies, and the bagatelle of one
day ripens into the catastrophe of the next. An oyster throws out
a secretion to surround a grain of sand, and so a pearl comes into
being; a pearl diver fishes it up, a merchant buys it and sells it
to a jeweller, who disposes of it to a customer. The customer is
robbed of it by two scoundrels who quarrel over the booty. One
slays the other, and perishes himself upon the scaffold. Here is
a direct chain of events with a sick mollusc for its first link,
and a gallows for its last one. Had that grain of sand not chanced
to wash in between the shells of the bivalve, two living breathing
beings with all their potentialities for good and for evil would
not have been blotted out from among their fellows. Who shall
undertake to judge what is really small and what is great?

Thus when in the year 1821 Don Diego Salvador bethought
him that if it paid the heretics in England to import the bark of
his cork oaks, it would pay him also to found a factory by which
the corks might be cut and sent out ready made, surely at first
sight no very vital human interests would appear to be affected.
Yet there were poor folk who would suffer, and suffer acutely--
women who would weep, and men who would become sallow and hungry-
looking and dangerous in places of which the Don had never heard,
and all on account of that one idea which had flashed across him as
he strutted, cigarettiferous, beneath the grateful shadow of his
limes. So crowded is this old globe of ours, and so interlaced our
interests, that one cannot think a new thought without some poor
devil being the better or the worse for it.

Don Diego Salvador was a capitalist, and the abstract thought soon
took the concrete form of a great square plastered building wherein
a couple of hundred of his swarthy countrymen worked with deft
nimble fingers at a rate of pay which no English artisan could have
accepted. Within a few months the result of this new competition
was an abrupt fall of prices in the trade, which was serious for
the largest firms and disastrous for the smaller ones. A few old-
established houses held on as they were, others reduced their
establishments and cut down their expenses, while one or two put up
their shutters and confessed themselves beaten. In this last
unfortunate category was the ancient and respected firm of
Fairbairn Brothers of Brisport.