because I call it my own, or my house.

It is not an original remark, but I make it here, that my home is
where I meet people with whom I sympathise, whom I love.

Well, that is my opinion as a middle-class man. Whether a working-
class man would think his family possession of his wretched little
room better than his share of the palace of which I have spoken, I
must leave to his opinion, and to the imaginations of the middle
class, who perhaps may sometimes conceive the fact that the said
worker is cramped for space and comfort--say on washing-day.

Before I leave this matter of the surroundings of life, I wish to
meet a possible objection. I have spoken of machinery being used
freely for releasing people from the more mechanical and repulsive
part of necessary labour; and I know that to some cultivated people,
people of the artistic turn of mind, machinery is particularly
distasteful, and they will be apt to say you will never get your
surroundings pleasant so long as you are surrounded by machinery. I
don't quite admit that; it is the allowing machines to be our masters
and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays. In
other words, it is the token of the terrible crime we have fallen
into of using our control of the powers of Nature for the purpose of
enslaving people, we careless meantime of how much happiness we rob
their lives of.

Yet for the consolation of the artists I will say that I believe
indeed that a state of social order would probably lead at first to a
great development of machinery for really useful purposes, because
people will still be anxious about getting through the work necessary