Utopia of Usurers | Page 6

people were needed to make such a mistake.
That is the romance that has been told about the big shops; in the
literature and art which they have bought, and which (as I said in my
recent articles) will soon be quite indistinguishable from their ordinary

advertisements. The literature is commercial; and it is only fair to say
that the commerce is often really literary. It is no romance, but only
rubbish.
The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally
incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are
omnipotent. Indeed, that is, and always has been, the whole point of a
monopoly; the old and sound argument against a monopoly. It is only
because it is incompetent that it has to be omnipotent. When one large
shop occupies the whole of one side of a street (or sometimes both
sides), it does so in order that men may be unable to get what they want;
and may be forced to buy what they don't want. That the rapidly
approaching kingdom of the Capitalists will ruin art and letters, I have
already said. I say here that in the only sense that can be called human,
it will ruin trade, too.
I will not let Christmas go by, even when writing for a revolutionary
paper necessarily appealing to many with none of my religious
sympathies, without appealing to those sympathies. I knew a man who
sent to a great rich shop for a figure for a group of Bethlehem. It
arrived broken. I think that is exactly all that business men have now
the sense to do.

IV. The War on Holidays
The general proposition, not always easy to define exhaustively, that
the reign of the capitalist will be the reign of the cad--that is, of the
unlicked type that is neither the citizen nor the gentleman--can be
excellently studied in its attitude towards holidays. The special
emblematic Employer of to-day, especially the Model Employer (who
is the worst sort) has in his starved and evil heart a sincere hatred of
holidays. I do not mean that he necessarily wants all his workmen to
work until they drop; that only occurs when he happens to be stupid as
well as wicked. I do not mean to say that he is necessarily unwilling to
grant what he would call "decent hours of labour." He may treat men
like dirt; but if you want to make money, even out of dirt, you must let

it lie fallow by some rotation of rest. He may treat men as dogs, but
unless he is a lunatic he will for certain periods let sleeping dogs lie.
But humane and reasonable hours for labour have nothing whatever to
do with the idea of holidays. It is not even a question of tenhours day
and eight-hours day; it is not a question of cutting down leisure to the
space necessary for food, sleep and exercise. If the modern employer
came to the conclusion, for some reason or other, that he could get
most out of his men by working them hard for only two hours a day, his
whole mental attitude would still be foreign and hostile to holidays. For
his whole mental attitude is that the passive time and the active time are
alike useful for him and his business. All is, indeed, grist that comes to
his mill, including the millers. His slaves still serve him in
unconsciousness, as dogs still hunt in slumber. His grist is ground not
only by the sounding wheels of iron, but by the soundless wheel of
blood and brain. His sacks are still filling silently when the doors are
shut on the streets and the sound of the grinding is low.
The Great Holiday
Now a holiday has no connection with using a man either by beating or
feeding him. When you give a man a holiday you give him back his
body and soul. It is quite possible you may be doing him an injury
(though he seldom thinks so), but that does not affect the question for
those to whom a holiday is holy. Immortality is the great holiday; and a
holiday, like the immortality in the old theologies, is a double-edged
privilege. But wherever it is genuine it is simply the restoration and
completion of the man. If people ever looked at the printed word under
their eye, the word "recreation" would be like the word "resurrection,"
the blast of a trumpet.
A man, being merely useful, is necessarily incomplete, especially if he
be a modern man and means by being useful being "utilitarian." A man
going into a modern club gives up his hat; a man going into a modern
factory gives up his head. He then goes in and works loyally for the