The dominating type of man in all the world's legislative bodies, for the time being, seems to be the considerer or reconsiderer, the man who dotes on the little and tiddly sides of great problems. The greatness of the problem furnishes, of course, the pleasant, pale glow, the happy sense of importance to a man, and then there is all the jolly littleness of the little things besides--the little things that a little man can make look big by getting them in the way of big ones--a great nation looking on and waiting.... For such a man there always seems to be a certain coziness and hominess in a Legislative Body.... As a seat in the House of Commons not unnaturally--every year it is hemmed or hawed in, gets farther and farther away from the people, it is becoming more and more apparent to the people every year that the Members of their House of Commons as a class are unlikely to do anything of a very striking or important or lasting value in the way of getting business men to be good. The more efficient and practical business men are coming to suspect that the members of the House of Commons, speaking broadly, do not know the will of the people, and that they could not express it in creative, straightforward and affirmative laws if they did. CHAPTER II OXFORD STREET HUMS. THE HOUSE HEMS But it is not only because the members of the House of Commons are selected in a vague way or because they are a vague kind of men, that they fail to represent the people. The third reason against having a House of Commons try to compel business men to be good, by law, is its out-of-the-way position. The out-of-the-way position that a Parliament occupies in getting business men to be good, can be best considered, perhaps, by admitting at the outset that a government really is one very real and genuine way a great people may have of expressing themselves, of expressing what they are like and what they want, and that business is another way. Then the question narrows down. Which way of expressing the people is the one that expresses them the most to the point, and which expresses them where their being expressed counts the most? The people have a Government. And the people have Business. What is a Government for? What is Business for? Business is the occupation of finding out and anticipating what the wants of the English people really are and of finding out ways of supplying them. The business men on Oxford Street hire twenty or thirty thousand men and women, keep them at work eight or nine hours a day, five or six days in a week, finding out what the things are that the English people want and reporting on them and supplying them. They are naturally in a strategic position to find out, not only what kinds of things the people want, but to find out, too, just how they want the things placed before them, what kind of storekeepers and manufacturers, salesmen and saleswomen they tolerate, like to deal with and prefer to have prosper.