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.
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