Time rolls on. I was wrong to have had champagne. It doesn't suit me
at tea. However, for the moment life is bright enough. I have looked
at the presents and my own is still there. And I have been given a
bagful of confetti. The weary weeks one lives through without a
handful of anything to throw at anybody. How good to be young again. I
take up a strong position in the hall.
They come... Got him--got him! Now a long shot--got him! I feel
slightly better, and begin the search for my hostess....
I have shaken hands with all the bride's aunts and all the
bridegroom's aunts, and in fact all the aunts of everybody here. Each
one seems to me more like my hostess than the last. "Good-bye!"
Fool--of course--there she is. "Good-Bye!"
My hat and I take the air again. A pleasant afternoon; and yet
to-morrow morning I shall see things more clearly, and I shall know
that the bridegroom has married the wrong girl. But it will be too
late then to save him.
Public Opinion
At the beginning of the last strike the papers announced that Public
Opinion was firmly opposed to dictation by a minority. Towards the end
of the strike the papers said that Public Opinion was strongly in
favour of a settlement which would leave neither side with a sense of
defeat. I do not complain of either of these statements, but I have
been wondering, as I have often wondered before, how a leader-writer
discovers what the Public Opinion is.
When one reads about Public Opinion in the press (and one reads a good
deal about it one way and another), it is a little difficult to
realize, particularly if the printer has used capital letters, that
this much-advertised Public Opinion is simply You and Me and the
Others. Now, since it is impossible for any man to get at the opinions
of all of us, it is necessary that he should content himself with a
sample half-dozen or so. But from where does he get his sample?
Possibly from his own club, limited perhaps to men of his own
political opinions; almost certainly from his own class. Public
Opinion in this case is simply what he thinks. Even if he takes the
opinion of strangers--the waiter who serves him at lunch, the
tobacconist, the policeman at the corner--the opinion may be one
specially prepared for his personal consumption, one inspired by tact,
boredom, or even a sense of humour. If, for instance, the process were
to be reversed, and my tobacconist were to ask me what I thought of
the strike, I should grunt and go out of his shop; but he would be
wrong to attribute "a dour grimness" to the nation in consequence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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