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