North and South: Chapter 28 Summary & Analysis

When Margaret sees the restful smile on the deceased Bessy’s face, she is glad to have come to the Higgins’. Soon Higgins arrives home, in shock from hearing the news on the street, and weeps violently. When he starts to leave, Mary is distressed; Bessy’s last words had been to keep her father from drink. Margaret stands defiantly in the doorway.

Though Higgins looks as though he will strike her, Margaret doesn’t stir an inch. They remain in a long standoff, until Higgins, grumbling, relents; Margaret feels “that he acknowledged her power.” Soon, in a “bold venture,” she proposes that Higgins accompany her home for tea.

When Margaret and Higgins arrive at the Hales’, Margaret runs ahead to warn her father about the surprise guest. When she notices the slight “repugnance” on Mr. Hale’s face, Margaret urges him that “he really is a man you will not dislike—if you won’t be shocked to begin with,” then adds, “you must not wonder at what he says; he’s an—I mean he does not believe in much of what we do.” Mr. Hale thinks, “Oh dear! A drunken infidel weaver!” but gamely does as Margaret asks.

When Margaret checks on the two men a short time later, she finds that Mr. Hale’s courteousness has “called out…all the latent courtesy in” Higgins—who is, after all, neither “an habitual drunkard nor a thorough infidel,” simply never having found “any form of faith to which he could attach himself, heart and soul.”

Higgins and Mr. Hale are discussing religion. Higgins says that if Mr. Hale had been born and bred in Milton, he wouldn’t have strong belief, either. Milton folk, he explains, are too preoccupied with earning their bread to worry about unproven teachings about things they’ve never seen. Furthermore, if Christian teachings were true “in men’s heart’s core,” the masters would be as insistent upon those teachings as they are about political economy.

Higgins ultimately admits that, after seeing the life Bessy has lived, he must believe “that there is a God, and that He set her her life…There’s but one thing steady and quiet i’ all this reeling world, and, reason or no reason, I’ll cling to that.” In a muttered aside, an emotional Mr. Hale tells Margaret that Higgins is no “infidel.”

Mr. Hale and Margaret change the subject to the strike. As they listen to Higgins, they gather that the workers, like the masters, tend to think of their fellow men “as if they possessed the calculable powers of machines” and make “no allowance for human passions getting the better of reason.” The workers are also contemptuous toward “them Irishers.” Higgins explains that because certain workers defied orders to keep the peace, the strike is now at an end, and the mills will reopen tomorrow; but he doesn’t know where he will find work himself.

Mr. Hale thinks the strikers have made some mistakes in their understanding of wage levels, and he offers to read Higgins some passages from a relevant book. Higgins tells him there’s no point, as he’s tried reading a book of economic theory before and found it meaningless. Mr. Hale says that, regardless, the book would have told him the truth by arguing that even a successful strike can only artificially inflate wages for a brief time.

Higgins stubbornly replies that, while that argument may or may not be true, such books are still gibberish to him. Even if he should come to understand one, he adds, “I’ll not be bound to say I shall end in thinking the same as any man. And I’m not one who [thinks] truth can be shaped out in words…Folk who sets up to doctor th’ world wi’ their truth, [must] suit [differently] for different minds.”

Mr. Hale wishes that the masters and men might be brought together to discuss such things, so that they might better understand one another’s point of view. Margaret doubts that Thornton could be persuaded. Hearing Thornton’s name, Higgins complains that Thornton ought to have made sure Boucher was punished for instigating violence. Margaret comments that the union doesn’t seem to have done Boucher much good.

Higgins explains to Margaret that the union shuns and ostracizes any worker who won’t join it. Margaret is shocked by this “tyranny.” Higgins, though, maintains that if this approach is sinful, it’s only what generations of unjust masters have driven them to; it’s a necessary “withstanding of injustice,” even if it causes harm to others in the process.

As the conversation ends, Higgins quietly promises Margaret that he will go straight home and not to the gin-shop. Mr. Hale invites Higgins to remain for family prayer, and Higgins wordlessly agrees. Thus “Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dissenter, Higgins the Infidel, knelt down together. It did them no harm.”