Page:Letters from America, Brooke, 1916.djvu/78

28 print of Botticelli, and a reproduction of an 'improvisation' by Herr Kandinsky. You may buy an Elizabethan dining-table, a Græco-Roman bronze, the latest dress designed by M. Bakst, or a packet of pins. Or you may sit and muse on the life of the employee of this place, who gets from it all that in less favoured civilisations family, guild, club, township, and nationality have given him or her. As a child he gets education, then evening-classes, continuation-schools, gymnasia, military training, swimming-baths, orchestra, facilities for the study of anything under the sun, from palæography to Cherokee, libraries, holiday-camps, hospitals, ever-present medical attendance, and at the end a pension, and, I suppose, a store cemetery. And all for the price of a few hours' work a day, and a little loyalty to the 'establishment.' Can human hearts desire more? And, when all millionaires are as sensible, will they? In industries and businesses like this, where the majority of the employed are women, it ought to be a pretty stable sort of millennium. Men, perhaps, take longer to learn that kind of 'loyalty.'

In one corner of this store is the advertising department. There are gathered poets,