tenant in case of violation, that the landlord into furnish everything in perfect order when the tenant comes in, and is to put everything in perfect order when the tenant goes out, and the tenant is not to touch anything, to clean it, or dust it, or roll it up in moth-balls and put it away in chests.  All is to be so sacredly and inalienably the property of the landlord that it shall constitute a kind of trespass if the tenant attempts to close the house for the summer or to open it for the winter in the usual way that houses are now closed and opened.  Otherwise my scheme would be measurably vitiated.”

“I see what you mean,” I murmured.  “Well?”

“Some years ago,” my friend went on, “when we came home from Europe, we left our furniture in storage for a time, while we rather drifted about, and did not settle anywhere in particular.  During that interval my wife opened and closed five furnished houses in two years.”

“And she has lived to tell the tale?”

“She has lived to tell it a great many times.  She can hardly be kept from telling it yet.  But it is my belief that, although she brought to the work all the anguish of a quickened conscience, under the influence of the American conditions she had returned to, she suffered far less in her encounters with either of those furnished houses than she now does with our own furniture when she shuts up our house in the summer, and opens it for the winter.  But if there had been a clause in the lease, as there should have been, forbidding her to put those houses in order when she left them, life would have been simply a rapture.  Why, in Europe custom almost supplies the place of statute in such cases, and you come and go so lightly in and out of furnished houses that you do not mind taking them for a month, or a few weeks.  We are very far behind in this matter, but I have no doubt that if we once came to do it on any extended scale we should do it, as we do everything else we attempt, more perfectly than any other people in the world.  You see what I mean?”

“I am not sure that I do.  But go on.”

“I would invert the whole Henry George principle, and I would tax personal property of the household kind so heavily that it would necessarily pass out of private hands; I would make its tenure so costly that it would be impossible to any but the very rich, who are also the very wicked, and ought to suffer.”

“Oh, come, now!”

“I refer you to your Testament.  In the end, all household property would pass into the hands of the state.”

“Aren’t you getting worse and worse?”

“Oh, I’m not supposing there won’t be a long interval when household property will be in the hands of powerful monopolies, and many millionaires will be made by letting it out to middle-class tenants like you and me, along with the houses we hire of them.  I have no doubt that there will be a Standard Household-Effect Company, which will extend its relations to Europe, and get the household effects of the whole world into its grasp.  It will be a fearful oppression, and we shall probably groan under it for generations, but it will liberate us from our personal ownership of them, and from the far more crushing weight of the mothball.  We shall suffer, but—­”