It is a very queer feeling one has about the People in the House of Commons.

I mean the feeling of their being under glass; they all seem so manageable, so quiet and so remote, a kind of glazed-over picture in still life, of themselves.  Every now and then, of course one takes a member seriously when he steps up to the huge showcase of specimen crowds, which members are always referring to in their speeches.  But nothing comes of it.

The crowds seem very remote there under the glass.  One feels like smashing something—­getting down to closer terms with them—­one longs for a Department Store or a bridge or a ’bus—­something that rattles and bangs and is.

All the while outside the mighty street—­that huge megaphone of the crowd, goes shouting past.  One wishes the House would notice it.  But no one does.  There is always just the House Itself and that hush or ring of silence around it, all England listening, all the little country papers far away with their hands up to their ears and the great serious-minded Dailies, and the witty Weeklies, the stately Monthlies, and Quarterlies all acting as if it mattered....

Even during the coal strike nothing really happened in the House of Commons.  There was a sense of the great serious people, of the crowds on Westminster Bridge surging softly through glass outside, but nothing got in.  Big Ben boomed down the river, across the pavements, over the hurrying crowds and over all the men and the women, the real business men and women.  The only thing about the House that seemed to have anything to do with anybody was Big Ben.

Finally one goes up to Harrod’s to get relief, or one takes a ’bus, or one tries Trafalgar Square, or one sees if one can really get across the Strand or one does something—­almost anything to recall one’s self to real life.

And then, of course, there is Oxford Street.

Almost always after watching the English people express themselves or straining to express themselves in the House of Commons, I try Oxford Street.

I know, of course, that as an art-form for expressing a great people, Oxford Street is not all that it should be, but there is certainly something, after all the mooniness and the dim droniness, and lawyer-mindedness in the way the English people express themselves or think that they ought to express themselves in their house of Commons—­there is certainly something that makes Oxford Street seem suddenly a fine, free, candid way for a great people to talk!  And there is all the gusto, too, the ’busses, the taxies, the hundreds of thousands of men and women saying things and buying things they believe.

Taking in the shops on both sides or the street, and taking in the things the people are doing behind the counters, and in the aisles, and up in the office windows three blocks of Oxford Street really express what the English people really want and what they really think and what they believe and put up money on, more than three years of the house of Commons.