Keeping the polls open once in so often, a few hours, and using hearsay and little slips of paper—­anybody dropping in—­seems a rather fluttery and uncertain way to pick out the representatives of the people, after one has considered three blocks of Oxford Street.

The next thing the crowd is going to do in getting what it wants from business men is to deal directly with the business men themselves and stop feeling, what many people feel partly from habit, perhaps, that the only way the crowd can get to what it wants is to go way over or way back or way around by Robin Hood’s barn or the House of Commons.

But there is a second reason: 

The trouble is not merely in the way men who sit in the House of Commons are selected.  The real deep-seated trouble with the men who sit in the House of Commons is that they like it.  The difficulty (as in the American Congress too) seems to be something in the men themselves.  It lies in what might be called, for lack of a better name, perhaps, the Hem and Haw or Parliament Temperament.

The dominating type of man in all the world’s legislative bodies, for the time being, seems to be the considerer or reconsiderer, the man who dotes on the little and tiddly sides of great problems.  The greatness of the problem furnishes, of course, the pleasant, pale glow, the happy sense of importance to a man, and then there is all the jolly littleness of the little things besides—­the little things that a little man can make look big by getting them in the way of big ones—­a great nation looking on and waiting....  For such a man there always seems to be a certain coziness and hominess in a Legislative Body....

As a seat in the House of Commons not unnaturally—­every year it is hemmed or hawed in, gets farther and farther away from the people, it is becoming more and more apparent to the people every year that the Members of their House of Commons as a class are unlikely to do anything of a very striking or important or lasting value in the way of getting business men to be good.

The more efficient and practical business men are coming to suspect that the members of the House of Commons, speaking broadly, do not know the will of the people, and that they could not express it in creative, straightforward and affirmative laws if they did.

CHAPTER II

OXFORD STREET HUMS. THE HOUSE HEMS

But it is not only because the members of the House of Commons are selected in a vague way or because they are a vague kind of men, that they fail to represent the people.

The third reason against having a House of Commons try to compel business men to be good, by law, is its out-of-the-way position.

The out-of-the-way position that a Parliament occupies in getting business men to be good, can be best considered, perhaps, by admitting at the outset that a government really is one very real and genuine way a great people may have of expressing themselves, of expressing what they are like and what they want, and that business is another way.