What is the chief economic outcome of this ideal? The chief outcome, I think, is to exaggerate the demand for goods, and to cause an enormously wasteful duplication of the apparatus of consumption. If the limit to one’s possessions should be simply the extent of one’s purse; if happiness is to be acquired through obtaining the comforts and luxuries of life; if a man who possesses a single house is considered fortunate, and a man who possesses five houses five times as fortunate; if there are no standards of living other than the insatiable one that has been set up in the Country House--well, then there is really no limit to the business of getting and spending, and our lives become the mean handiwork of coachman, cook, and groom. Our Country House will not merely be a house: there will be a chapel, an art gallery, a theater, a gymnasium, as François Rabelais imagined. As the common possessions of the community dwindle, the private possessions of individuals are multiplied; and at last, there remains no other community than a multitude of anarchic individuals, each of whom is doing his best to create for himself a Country House, notwithstanding the fact that the net result of his endeavors--this is the drab tragedy and the final thing to be said against it--is perhaps nothing better than six inadequate rooms at the end of nowhere in a Philadelphia suburb. The Country House, then, is the chief pattern by means of which the mediæval order was transformed into the modern order. It does not matter very much whether the Country House is an estate on Long Island or a cottage in Montclair; whether it is a house in Golder’s Green or a family manor in Devonshire: these are essentially affairs of scale, and the underlying identity is plain enough. The idolum of the Country House prevails even when quarters are taken up in the midst of the metropolis. More than ever the Country House today tries to make up by an abundance of physical goods for all that has been lost through its divorce from the underlying community; more than ever it attempts to be self-sufficient within the limits of suburbia. The automobile, the phonograph, and the radio-telephone have only served to increase this self-sufficiency; and I need not show at length how these instrumentalities have deepened the elements of acquisitiveness and passive, uncreative, mechanical enjoyment. The Country House’s passionate demand for physical goods has given rise to another institution, Coketown; and it is the idolum of Coketown, the industrial age’s contribution to the Country House, that we have now to consider. 8