On Electric Houses

Iam informed that there is an elaborately electrified house on view: a house in which the householder can be completely electrified 3 or possibly electroplated 3 or perhaps eventually electrocuted, which would seem a not unlikely refuge for anybody who had to live in that sort of house. Indeed, when I heard a lecturer a little while ago explain at some length (with the assistance of lantern slides) the complicated but complete apparatus of such a domestic system, I ventured to ask whereabouts in the electric house they had fitted up the electric chair. That would seem to be the most rapid and reasonable form of comfort in such a place. Or it might be useful for mild and well-considered experiments in murder, even before we came to the final experiment of suicide. The case for murder seems to me to be curiously neglected in the free and emancipated moral controversies of our time. I am perpetually being told that there are a number of hard cases arising out of the traditional respect for marriage. I could easily provide, from my own experience, half a dozen cases in which great discomfort has arisen out of the conventional prejudice against murder. I could give social instances which seem to cry out for assassination quite as pathetically as any that are supposed to cry out for divorce. Nor is it true to say that all such cases could be met by divorce or other division. Many are cases in which nothing but death could deprive the obnoxious person of his psychological or other influence over better people than himself. To give the names of those in my social circle, whom I mark out for extinction, would at present be premature and even embarrassing. But if I had a nice, neat, comfortable electric chair fitted up in my house, on the model of those fitted up in American prisons, I could quickly and quietly make a clearance of a great many of these social difficulties. It would be easy to receive a particular guest with gestures of hospitality j to wave him to a special seat with a special earnestness 3 to see him settled comfortably in it j and then to press a button with a smile and a sigh of relief. The hospitable gesture involved is not difficult. People often wave me towards particular chairs in their drawing-rooms 3 generally towards any massive seat of marble or granite, or to any cast-iron throne firmly clamped to the floor. And they always say, with a beaming smile, that they think it will suit me better. With heartfelt sincerity, I could say to the guest in question that I think the electric chair would suit him better. Difficulties might arise, of course, when he was dead 3 such difficulties have always embarrassed the moral reformer who assumed the specialist duties of the murderer. But, even here, electricity gives its ever-present aid. Obviously another button would be pressed 3 and the chair with its contents would sink through the floor, where the corpse would be mechanically ejected and consumed completely in an electric stove. Now here we have a real and serious social use for electricity j almost the only one I can think of, which could practically improve our present domestic life. But I cannot find a word about it in any of the accounts given to me of the Model Electric House.

That model house, I am informed, is described as the house of the future, dated less than a hundred years hence. I can imagine that even this prophecy might have its cheerful and enlivening aspect. The principle of comparison is often applied to our ancestors 3 and might equally wisely be applied to our descendants. We are often shown exhibitions of Elizabethan or Early Georgian domestic architecture, with the notion of suggesting to us how much architecture has advanced since those days. It is generally pointed out to us that many of the oldest English houses are only built of wood. It is generally not pointed out to us that most of the newest American houses are also built of wood. It is certainly not pointed out that these very houses that are now built of wood, are those in which there are most of the new electrical appliances. These things are not emphasized j because the object of the exposition is quite the contrary. We are shown the rude hovels of our ancestors, that we may be consoled by feeling that things might be worse even than they are. We are told that ancient Britons lived in low huts of wattle, or what not, that we may consider a brick villa in Balham is almost tolerable by comparison. In short, there are many who insist on all that was dark or gross or negligent in the conditions of early barbarism, so that modern civilization may for one wild moment take on a fanciful semblance of decency. But old things have to be made very black indeed, if modern things are not to look blacker.

Well, I cannot see why the same ingenious trick of comparison should not be tried in the case of the future as well as the past. As we produce an appalling picture of our great-grandfather in his hideous mud hovel, so we naturally produce an equally appalling picture of our great-grandson in his hideous electric house. Both will equally serve to raise our own spirits, and to lift up our hearts in humble gratitude to Providence, for the privilege of having been born not only after the former event but before the latter. I can imagine crowds of modern people coming away from the Ideal Homes Exhibition with beaming faces and rejoicing hearts, crowing aloud with pleasure or leaping and skipping lightly upon

ON ELECTRIC HOUSES 8i the road, at the thought of what they have escaped, by being born ninety years too soon for the Electric Houses. Surely anything that encourages contentment, and the reconciliation of men to their lot, is to be encouraged upon social grounds 3 and it is just as reasonable to teach unlucky people that they are lucky not to be their own descendants, as to teach them that they are lucky not to be their own ancestors. Neither perhaps will be wholly convincing or satisfying to a curious and inquiring mind 3 which might go so far as to demand that present conditions should be made decent in themselves, and not merely by comparison with the past or the future. But as an exposition of the comparative method, I can imagine few more effective than all this discussion about electricity and modern appliances. It is far more vivid and striking than the vague and dreary visions of the caves of the cave-men or the mud cabins of the peasants. The historical pictures of these past things are seldom detailed and never accurate in detail. They are not to be compared for a moment with the white and glittering nightmare of the steel house. The new scientific architecture can be perfected to a point of ghastly and demoniac ugliness towards which the dark fancies of our savage fathers would grope in vain, their legends were after all shadowy and unconvincing compared to our facts. None of those benighted slaves of mythology or theology ever imagined a hell to equal what the moderns have imagined as a home.

As to the confident assertions that these things really will be the characteristics of social existence a generation or two hence, I suppose we need not take them very seriously. People are always prophesying what will happen nextj and they are always falling into the fatuous and obvious folly of making it merely the same as what has happened last. As the French king was certainly more powerful in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth century, everybody would have prophesied that at the end of the eighteenth century he would be more powerful still. At the end of the eighteenth century he has ceased to exist. All the predictions of this sort are based on the idea that there has never been such a thing as a revolution or a reaction. Whether there will be a reaction against materialism before the date mentioned I do not knowj and it is probable that I shall not care. By that date I shall have ceased to exist on this earth, like the French monarchy. For that alone I can be thankful for life — and death.