Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/292

 is a mistake, as the man said when his wife presented him with four new healthy children in one day. We should practise moderation in all matters. A little enamel paint would have been good. They might have enamelled the house inside and out, and have left the furniture alone. Or they might have coloured the furniture, and let the house be. But an entirely and completely enamelled home—a home, such as enamel-paint manufacturers love to picture on their advertisements, over which the yearning eye wanders in vain, seeking one single square inch of unenamelled matter—is, I am convinced, a mistake. It may be a home that, as the testimonials assure us, will easily wash. It may be an "artistic" home; but the average man is not yet educated up to the appreciation of it. The average man does not care for high art. At a certain point, the average man gets sick of high art.

So, in these coming Utopias, in which our unhappy grandchildren will have to drag out their colourless existence, there will be too much electricity. They will grow to loathe electricity.

Electricity is going to light them, warm them, carry them, doctor them, cook for them, execute them, if necessary. They are going to be weaned on electricity, rocked in their cradles by electricity, slapped by electricity, ruled and regulated and guided by electricity, buried by electricity. I may be wrong, but I rather think they are going to be hatched by electricity.

In the new world of our progressionist teachers, it is electricity that is the real motive-power. The men and women are only marionettes—worked by electricity.

But it was not to speak of the electricity in them, but of the originality in them, that I referred to these works