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.