UTOPIA OF USURERS - III Unbusinesslike Business

Utopia of Userers, et al

by Gilbert K. Chesterton

UTOPIA OF USURERS - III UNBUSINESSLIKE BUSINESS, UTOPIA OF USERERS, ET AL by Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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 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.