it will have sham
chimneys, in whose darkness, unless they are built solid, dust and
filth will gather, and luckless birds and insects pass horrible last
hours of ineffectual struggle. It may have automatic window-cleaning
arrangements, but they will be hidden by "picturesque" mullions. The
sham chimneys will, perhaps, be made to smoke genially in winter by some
ingenious contrivance, there may be sham open fireplaces within, with
ingle nooks about the sham glowing logs. The needlessly steep roofs will
have a sham sag and sham timbered gables, and probably forced lichens
will give it a sham appearance of age. Just that feeble-minded
contemporary shirking of the truth of things that has given the world
such stockbroker in armour affairs as the Tower Bridge and historical
romance, will, I fear, worry the lucid mind in a great multitude of the
homes that the opening half, at least, of this century will produce.

In quite a similar way the shareholding body will buy up all the clever
and more enterprising makers and designers of clothing and adornment, he
will set the fashion of almost all ornament, in bookbinding and printing
and painting, for example, furnishing, and indeed of almost all things
that are not primarily produced "for the million," as the phrase goes.
And where that sort of thing comes in, then, so far as the trained and
intelligent type of man goes, for many years yet it will be simply a
case of the nether instead of the upper millstone. Just how far the
influence and contagion of the shareholding mass will reach into this
imaginary household of non-shareholding efficients, and just how far the
influence of science and mechanism will penetrate the minds and methods
of the rich, becomes really one of the most important questions with
which these speculations will deal. For this argument that he will
perhaps be able to buy up the architect and the tailor and the decorator
and so forth is merely preliminary to the graver issue. It is just
possible that the shareholder may, to a very large extent--in a certain
figurative sense, at least--buy up much of the womankind that would
otherwise be available to constitute those severe, capable, and probably
by no means unhappy little establishments to which our typical engineers
will tend, and so prevent many women from becoming mothers of a
regenerating world. The huge secretion of irresponsible wealth by the
social organism is certain to affect the tone of thought of th