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Or course, the Slater mills, like all other New England mills, had been over-milked for profits. It was the same old story of a family-owned industry. The family grows larger in each generation. There are more people who want money and they all want to live as well as grandpa did. So the mills had been milked. The family, however, had now come down to being pretty small. Nelson and his sister had, I think, bought out most of the other Slaters - that is, the cousins who had an interest in it. His mother was mentally ill, so they had some problems about her because she had to sign over her property and she wouldn't. At any rate, they had these mills on their hands and they wanted to make them go.

I always used to say that Nelson was an example of the younger, modern generation in industry, who although born of a family who thought the mills existed to give them money, had himself been better educated in economics and social purposes than had their fathers or grandfathers. This generation illustrate my theory that this conception of social responsibility and social justice spread through all layers of society in the early part of the 20th Century and the latter part of the 19th Century. It spread not as an action, out as an idea. It became unthinkable that a person with money should not make contributions to the local hospitals, the local charity relief, and so on. That