If the House of Commons were more like Oxford Street or even if it had suddenly something of the tone of Oxford Street, if suddenly it were to begin some fine morning to express England the way Oxford Street does, would not one see, in less than three months, new kinds and new sizes of men all over England, wanting to belong to it?
Big, powerful, uncompromising, creative men who have no time for twiddling, who never would have dreamed of being tucked away in the house of Commons before, would want to belong to it.
In the meantime, of course, the men of England who have empires to express, are not unnaturally expressing them in more simple language like foundries, soap factories around a world, tungsten mines, department stores, banks, subways, railroads for seventy nations, and ships on seven seas, Winnipeg trolleys and little New York skyscrapers.
Business men of the more usual or humdrum kind could not do it, but certainly, the first day that business men like these, of the first or world-size class, once find the House of Commons a place they like to be in, once begin expressing the genius of the English people in government as they are already expressing the genius of the English people in owning the earth, in buying and selling, in inventing things and in inventing corporations, the House of Commons will cease to be a bog of words, an abyss of committees, and legislation will begin to be run like a railroad—on a block signal system, rows of things taken up, gone over, and finished. The click of the signal. Then the next thing.
I sit in my club and look out of the window and think. Just outside thousands of taxies shooting all these little mighty wills of men across my window, across London, across England, across the world ... the huge, imperious street ... all these men hurling themselves about in it, joining their wills on to telephone wires, to mighty trains and little quiet country roads, hitching up cables to their wills, and ships—hitching up the very clouds over the sea to their wills and running a world—why are not men like these—men who have the street-spirit in them, this motor genius of driving through to what they want, taking seats in the House of Commons?
Perhaps Oxford Street is more efficient and more characteristic in expressing the genius and the will of the English people than the House of Commons is because of the way in which the people select the men they want to express them in Oxford Street.
It may be that the men the people have selected to be at the top of the nation's law-making are not selected by as skillful, painstaking, or thorough a process as the men who have been selected to be placed at the top of the nation's buying and selling.
Possibly the reason the House of Commons does not express the will of the people is, that its members are merely selected in a loose, vague way and by merely counting noses.
Possibly, too, the men who are selected by a true, honest, direct, natural selection to be the leaders and to free the energies and steer the work of the people, the men who are selected to lead by being seen and lived with and worked with all day, every day, are better selected men than men who having been voted on on slips of paper, and having been seen in newspaper paragraphs, travel up to London and begin thoughtlessly running a world.
The business man drops into the House of Commons after the meeting of his firm in Bond Street, Lombard Street, or Oxford Street and takes a look at it. He sees before him a huge tool or piece of machinery—a body of men intended to work together and to get certain grave, particular, and important things done, that the people want done, and he does not see how a great good-hearted chaos or welter, a kind of chance national Weather of Human Nature like the House of Commons, can get the things done.