NEWS AND GOVERNMENT
CHAPTER I
OXFORD STREET AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
Every now and then when I am in London (at the instigation of some business man who takes the time off to belong to it), I drop into a pleasant but other-worldly and absent-minded place called the House of Commons.
I sit in the windows in the smoking-room and watch the faces of the members all about me and watch the steamships, strangely, softly, suddenly—Shakespeare and Pepys, outside on the river, slip gravely by under glass.
Or I go in and sit down under the gallery, face to face with the Speaker, looking across those profiles of world-makers in their seats; and I watch and listen in the House itself. There is a kind of pleasant, convenient, appropriate hush upon the world there.
Wisdom.
The decorous, orderly machinery of knowledge rolls over one—one listens to It, to the soft clatter of the endless belt of words.
Every now and then one sees a member in the middle of a speech, or possibly in the middle of a sentence, slip up quietly and take a look (under glass) at The People, or he uses a microscope, perhaps, or a reading glass on The People, Mr. Bonar Law's, Mr. Lloyd George's, Ramsay MacDonald's, Will Crook's, or somebody's. Then he comes back gravely as if he had got the people attended to now, and finishes what he was saying.