John Grant, son of a poor Scottish Highlander, made a fateful bargain with those exploiting the weakness of others. In choosing to become a cloth merchant, he hid from himself the appalling treatment of the powerless. The letters of this remarkable multi-generational family, previously unpublished, give immediacy to the profound dislocations created by British efforts to mass produce cotton cloth, the generator of the Industrial Revolution. The legacy of these violations would exact a price from the Grant family.