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.
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