Utopia of Usurers | Page 5

poets becoming court poets,
under kings that have taken no oath, nor led us into any battle.

III. Unbusinesslike Business
The fairy tales we were all taught did not, like the history we were all
taught, consist entirely of lies. Parts of the tale of "Puss in Boots" or
"Jack and the Beanstalk" may strike the realistic eye as a little unlikely
and out of the common way, so to speak; but they contain some very
solid and very practical truths. For instance, it may be noted that both
in "Puss in Boots" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" if I remember aright,
the ogre was not only an ogre but also a magician. And it will generally
be found that in all such popular narratives, the king, if he is a wicked
king, is generally also a wizard. Now there is a very vital human truth
enshrined in this. Bad government, like good government, is a spiritual
thing. Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but mostly by fairy
tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant, the great employer. The sight
of a millionaire is seldom, in the ordinary sense, an enchanting sight:
nevertheless, he is in his way an enchanter. As they say in the gushing
articles about him in the magazines, he is a fascinating personality. So
is a snake. At least he is fascinating to rabbits; and so is the millionaire
to the rabbit-witted sort of people that ladies and gentlemen have
allowed themselves to become. He does, in a manner, cast a spell, such
as that which imprisoned princes and princesses under the shapes of
falcons or stags. He has truly turned men into sheep, as Circe turned
them into swine.
Now, the chief of the fairy tales, by which he gains this glory and
glamour, is a certain hazy association he has managed to create
between the idea of bigness and the idea of practicality. Numbers of the
rabbit-witted ladies and gentlemen do really think, in spite of
themselves and their experience, that so long as a shop has hundreds of
different doors and a great many hot and unhealthy underground
departments (they must be hot; this is very important), and more people
than would be needed for a man-of-war, or crowded cathedral, to say:
"This way, madam," and "The next article, sir," it follows that the
goods are good. In short, they hold that the big businesses are
businesslike. They are not. Any housekeeper in a truthful mood, that is
to say, any housekeeper in a bad temper, will tell you that they are not.

But housekeepers, too, are human, and therefore inconsistent and
complex; and they do not always stick to truth and bad temper. They
are also affected by this queer idolatry of the enormous and elaborate;
and cannot help feeling that anything so complicated must go like
clockwork. But complexity is no guarantee of accuracy--in clockwork
or in anything else. A clock can be as wrong as the human head; and a
clock can stop, as suddenly as the human heart.
But this strange poetry of plutocracy prevails over people against their
very senses. You write to one of the great London stores or emporia,
asking, let us say, for an umbrella. A month or two afterwards you
receive a very elaborately constructed parcel, containing a broken
parasol. You are very pleased. You are gratified to reflect on what a
vast number of assistants and employees had combined to break that
parasol. You luxuriate in the memory of all those long rooms and
departments and wonder in which of them the parasol that you never
ordered was broken. Or you want a toy elephant for your child on
Christmas Day; as children, like all nice and healthy people, are very
ritualistic. Some week or so after Twelfth Night, let us say, you have
the pleasure of removing three layers of pasteboards, five layers of
brown paper, and fifteen layers of tissue paper and discovering the
fragments of an artificial crocodile. You smile in an expansive spirit.
You feel that your soul has been broadened by the vision of
incompetence conducted on so large a scale. You admire all the more
the colossal and Omnipresent Brain of the Organiser of Industry, who
amid all his multitudinous cares did not disdain to remember his duty
of smashing even the smallest toy of the smallest child. Or, supposing
you have asked him to send you some two rolls of cocoa-nut matting:
and supposing (after a due interval for reflection) he duly delivers to
you the five rolls of wire netting. You take pleasure in the
consideration of a mystery: which coarse minds might have called a
mistake. It consoles you to know how big the business is: and what an
enormous number of