What would please the employers more, give them a general, or national confidence in trying to run business and improve the conditions of work to-day, than to have their employees, suddenly, all over the nation, begin doing their work so well that they would be fit to run the factories?

What is true of employers and employees in factories is still more true of the employers and employees in the great retail stores.  If there is one thing rather than another the business men and women on Oxford Street, the managers, floor walkers and clerks all up and down the street are really engaged in all day all their lives, it is what might be called a daily nine-hour drill in understanding people.  Why should employers and employees like these—­experts in human nature—­men who make their profession a success by studying human nature, and by working in it daily, call in a few drifting gentlemen from the House of Commons and expect them to work out their human problems better than they can do it?

Employers and clerks in retail stores are the two sets of people in all the world most competent to study together the working details of human nature, to act for themselves in self-respecting man-fashion and without whining at a nation.

Who that they could hope to deal with and get what they want from, could know more about human nature than they do?  Are they not the men of all others, all up and down that little strip of Oxford Street, who devote their entire time to human nature?  They are in the daily profession of knowing the soonest and knowing the most about what people are like, and about what people will probably think.  They are intimate with their peccadillos in what they want to wear and in what they want to eat; they have learned their likes and dislikes in human nature; they know what they will support and what they will defy in human nature, in clerks, and in stores, and in storekeepers.

And these things that they have learned about human nature (in themselves and other people) they have learned not by talking about human nature but by a grim daily doing things with it.

These things being so, it would almost seem that these people and people like them were qualified to act, and as they happen to be in the one strategic position, both employers and employees alike, to act and to act for themselves and act directly and act together, it will not be very long, probably, before the nation will be very glad to have them do it.

It is likely to be seen very soon (at least by all skilled Labour and all skilled Capital) that running out into the street and crying “Help!” and calling in some third person to settle family difficulties that can be better settled by being faced and thought out in private, is an inefficient and incompetent thing to do.

And for the most part it is going to be only in the more superficial, inefficient, thoughtless industry that men, either employers or employed, will be inclined to leave their daily work, run out wildly and drag in a House of Commons to help them to do right.