Standard Household-Effect Company | Page 6

hands; I would make its tenure so costly
that it would be impossible to any but the very rich, who are also the
very wicked, and ought to suffer."
"Oh, come, now!"
"I refer you to your Testament. In the end, all household property
would pass into the hands of the state."
"Aren't you getting worse and worse?"
"Oh, I'm not supposing there won't be a long interval when household

property will be in the hands of powerful monopolies, and many
millionaires will be made by letting it out to middle-class tenants like
you and me, along with the houses we hire of them. I have no doubt
that there will be a Standard Household-Effect Company, which will
extend its relations to Europe, and get the household effects of the
whole world into its grasp. It will be a fearful oppression, and we shall
probably groan under it for generations, but it will liberate us from our
personal ownership of them, and from the far more crushing weight of
the moth- ball. We shall suffer, but--"
"I see what you mean," I hastened to interrupt at this point, "but these
suggestive remarks of yours are getting beyond--Do you think you
could defer the rest of your incompleted sentence for a week?"
"Well, for not more than a week," said my friend, with an air of
discomfort in his arrest.

II.
--"We shall not suffer so much as we do under our present system,"
said my friend, completing his sentence after the interruption of a week.
By this time we had both left town, and were taking up the talk again
on the veranda of a sea-side hotel. "As for the eternal-womanly, it will
be her salvation from herself. When once she is expropriated from her
household effects, and forbidden under severe penalties from meddling
with those of the Standard Household-Effect Company, she will begin
to get back her peace of mind, and be the same blessing she was before
she began housekeeping."
"That may all very well be," I assented, though I did not believe it, and
I found something almost too fantastical in my friend's scheme. "But
when we are expropriated from all our dearest belongings, what is to
become of our tender and sacred associations with them?"
"What has become of devotion to the family gods, and the worship of
ancestors? Once the graves of the dead were at the door of the living, so
that libations might be conveniently poured out on them, and the
ground where they lay was inalienable because it was supposed to be
used by their spirits as well as their bodies. A man could not sell the
bones, because he could not sell the ghosts, of his kindred. By-and by,
when religion ceased to be domestic and became social, and the service
of the gods was carried on in temples common to all, it was found that

the tombs of one's forefathers could be sold without violence to their
spectres. I dare say it wouldn't be different in the case of our tender and
sacred associations with tables and chairs, pots and pans, beds and
bedding, pictures and bric-a-brac. We have only to evolve a little
further. In fact we have already evolved far beyond the point that
troubles you. Most people in modern towns and cities have changed
their domiciles from ten to twenty times during their lives, and have not
paid the slightest attention to the tender and sacred associations
connected with them. I don't suppose you would say that a man has no
such associations with the house that has sheltered him, while he has
them with the stuff that has furnished it?"
"No, I shouldn't say that."
"If anything, the house should be dearer than the household gear. Yet at
each remove we drag a lengthening chain of tables, chairs, side-boards,
portraits, landscapes, bedsteads, washstands, stoves, kitchen utensils,
and bric-a-brac after us, because, as my wife says, we cannot bear to
part with them. At several times in our own lives we have accumulated
stuff enough to furnish two or three house and have paid a pretty stiff
house-rent in the form of storage for the overflow. Why, I am doing
that very thing now! Aren't you?"
"I am--in a certain degree," I assented.
"We all are, we well-to-do people, as we think ourselves. Once my wife
and I revolted by a common impulse against the ridiculous waste and
slavery of the thing. We went to the storage warehouse and sent three
or four vanloads of the rubbish to the auctioneer. Some of the pieces we
had not seen for years, and as each was hauled out for us to inspect and
decide upon, we condemned it to the auction-block with shouts of
rejoicing. Tender and sacred associations! We