The almost sacramental idea of representation, by which the few may incarnate the many, arose in the Middle Ages, and has done great things for justice and liberty.  It has had its real hours of triumph, as when the States General met to renew France’s youth like the eagle’s; or when all the virtues of the Republic fought and ruled in the figure of Washington.  It is not having one of its hours of triumph now.  The real democratic unrest at this moment is not an extension of the representative process, but rather a revolt against it.  It is no good giving those now in revolt more boards and committees and compulsory regulations.  It is against these very things that they are revolting.  Men are not only rising against their oppressors, but against their representatives or, as they would say, their misrepresentatives.  The inner and actual spirit of workaday England is coming out not in applause, but in anger, as a god who should come out of his tabernacle to rebuke and confound his priests.

There is a certain kind of man whom we see many times in a day, but whom we do not, in general, bother very much about.  He is the kind of man of whom his wife says that a better husband when he’s sober you couldn’t have.  She sometimes adds that he never is sober; but this is in anger and exaggeration.  Really he drinks much less and works much more than the modern legend supposes.  But it is quite true that he has not the horror of bodily outbreak, natural to the classes that contain ladies; and it is quite true that he never has that alert and inventive sort of industry natural to the classes from which men can climb into great wealth.  He has grown, partly by necessity, but partly also by temper, accustomed to have dirty clothes and dirty hands normally and without discomfort.  He regards cleanliness as a kind of separate and special costume; to be put on for great festivals.  He has several really curious characteristics, which would attract the eyes of sociologists, if they had any eyes.  For instance, his vocabulary is coarse and abusive, in marked contrast to his actual spirit, which is generally patient and civil.  He has an odd way of using certain words of really horrible meaning, but using them quite innocently and without the most distant taint of the evils to which they allude.  He is rather sentimental; and, like most sentimental people, not devoid of snobbishness.  At the same time, he believes the ordinary manly commonplaces of freedom and fraternity as he believes most of the decent traditions of Christian men:  he finds it very difficult to act according to them, but this difficulty is not confined to him.  He has a strong and individual sense of humour, and not much power of corporate or militant action.  He is not a Socialist.  Finally, he bears no more resemblance to a Labour Member than he does to a City Alderman or a Die-Hard Duke.  This is the Common Labourer of England; and it is he who is on the march at last.