Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/126

 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 book-binding 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 the result of this sort of thing will be, for many years yet, as far as is concerned the trained and intelligent type of man, merely an exchange of the upper for the nether 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 the shareholder 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 he 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