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MODES AND MORALS

THE NEW SIMPLICITY

Y first caption was Democracy, Plumbing, and the War. That will hardly

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do as a title, for it does not hint the heart of the matter; though the war has precipitated conditions which our special form of democracy has long been preparing us for, and plumbing is perhaps as symbolic as it is ubiquitous in the American domestic scene. All three, with all their implications, are factors, certainly, in our present problem of living, and if war has brought that problem to acuteness, democracy and plumbing (and what they may be taken to stand for) have made us ripe for upheaval. Edison and his like are as responsible, in their way, as Thomas Jefferson or William Haywood. All three have, without doubt, contributed to the present and future dilemma of educated people in moderate circumstances. War has, of necessity, turned moderate circumstances to actual poverty; but democracy and plumbing were already preparing the débâcle for this group. All of us-the educated classes as well as the uneducated—are guilty together, that is, of pampering ourselves with physical comforts; and democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality

that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical. Democracy and plumbing, as well as war, make the problem of our immediate future a rather special one. We do not share all phases of it with our Allies. Let me explain, a little, what I mean.

If America has led the world in labor-saving devices, it is because America is democratic on a bigger scale than any other country. The person who profits by the labor-saving device is the person who does the work. The fact that France and England have not kept pace with us in plumbing and tiled kitchens and electrical appliances does not mean-as we have sometimes fatuously taken it to mean—that they are less civilized than we. It means only that personal service has been, with them, cheaper and more a matter of course. Where prosperous Americans multiply vacuum cleaners and electric washing machines and garbage incinerators, prosperous Europeans multiply their number of servants. The Englishman really prefers a huge tin tub in his bedroom of a morning. We prefer to walk into the bathroom and turn on the tap. That preference may well have become so natural that we cannot explain it. But the origin of the American preference is surely that in America only the very rich could afford a personal servant whose duty it was to set up the tub, fetch in huge cans of water, and remove all traces of the bath as soon as it was

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