If I were an Englishman I would rather be elected to walk up and down Oxford Street and read what I saw there than to be elected to a seat in the House of Commons, and I could accomplish more and learn more for a nation, with three blocks of Oxford Street, with what I could gather up and read there, and with what I could resent and believe there, than I could with three years of the House of Commons.
I know that anybody, of course, could be elected to walk up and down Oxford Street. But it is enough for me.
So I almost always try it after the house of Commons.
And when I have taken a little swing down Oxford Street and got the House of Commons out of my system a little, perhaps I go down to the Embankment, and drop into my club.
Then I sit in the window and mull.
If the English people express themselves and express what they want and what they are bound to have, on Oxford Street and put their money down for it, so much better than they do in the House of Commons, why should they not do it there?
Why should elaborate, roundabout, mysterious things like governments, that have to be spoken of in whispers (and that express themselves usually in a kind of lawyer-minded way, in picked and dried words like wills), be looked upon so seriously, and be taken on the whole, as the main reliance the people have, in a great nation, for expressing themselves?
Why should not a great people be allowed to say what they are like and to say what they want and what they are bound to get, in the way Oxford Street says things, in a few straight, clean-cut, ordinary words, in long quiet rows of deeds, of buying and selling and acting?
Pounds, shillings, and silence.
Then on to the next thing.