of a group of millionaires who have discovered a way of honestly amusing themselves while gaining applause and advertisement.  Within the foyer and beyond the staircase, notice the outer rooms, partitioned off by bronze grilles, looming darkly gorgeous in an eternal windowless twilight studded with the beautiful glowing green disks of electric-lamp shades; and under each disk a human head bent over the black-and-red magic of ledgers!  The desired effect is at once obtained, and it is wonderful.  Then lose yourself in and out of the ascending and descending elevators, and among the unending multitudes of clerks, and along the corridors of marble (total length exactly measured and recorded).  You will be struck dumb.  And immediately you begin to recover your speech you will be struck dumb again....

Other houses, as has been seen, provide good meals for their employees at cost price.  This house, then, will provide excellent meals, free of charge!  It will install the most expensive kitchens and richly spacious restaurants.  It will serve the delicate repasts with dignity.  “Does all this lessen the wages?” No, not in theory.  But in practice, and whether the management wishes or not, it must come out of the wages.  “Why do you do it?” you ask the departmental chief, who apparently gets far more fun out of the contemplation of these refectories than out of the contemplation of premiums received and claims paid.  “It is better for the employees,” he says.  “But we do it because it is better for us.  It pays us.  Good food, physical comfort, agreeable environment, scientific ventilation—­all these things pay us.  We get results from them.”  He does not mention horses, but you feel that the comparison is with horses.  A horse, or a clerk, or an artisan—­it pays equally well to treat all of them well.  This is one of the latest discoveries of economic science, a discovery not yet universally understood.

[Illustration:  A YOUNG WOMAN WAS JUST FINISHING A FLORID SONG]

I say you do not mention horses, and you certainly must not hint that the men in authority may have been actuated by motives of humanity.  You must believe what you are told—­that the sole motive is to get results.  The eagerness with which all heads of model establishments would disavow to me any thought of being humane was affecting in its naivete; it had that touch of ingenuous wistfulness which I remarked everywhere in America—­and nowhere more than in the demeanor of many mercantile highnesses. (I hardly expect Americans to understand just what I mean here.) It was as if they would blush at being caught in an act of humanity, like school-boys caught praying.  Still, to my mind, the white purity of their desire to get financial results was often muddied by the dark stain of a humane motive.  I may be wrong (as people say), but I know I am not (as people think).

The further you advance into the penetralia of this arch-exemplar of American organization and profusion, the more you are amazed by the imaginative perfection of its detail:  as well in the system of filing for instant reference fifty million separate documents, as in the planning of a concert-hall for the diversion of the human machines.