The flower and exemplar of well-nigh everything that is choicely and brutally English may be summed up in the English politician. Such a tub-thumper, such a master of claptrap and the arts and feints and fetches of oratory, has never been known before since the world began. He is English, and therefore he knows his business. He has made a study of it as a business, and without regard to its more serious issues. His position is, that, if he would do himself well, he must tie himself hand and foot to some party, and serve that party through thick and thin. Then in the end, and with good luck, will come reward. You may be born in a chandler's shop. By birth, therefore, you belong to the very lower English middle class. Through the practice of a number of commercial virtues, and with the help of considerable speculation outside your own business, you become wealthy. Now, wealth without honour is nothing to an Englishman. He cannot brook that his wealth, his shining, glorious superfluity, should be hidden under a bushel. Therefore he seeks municipal honours; he becomes a town councillor, an alderman, a mayor even. But these, after all, are not the summits; they lead at best only to a common knighthood, and any fool can get knighted if he wants to. So you determine to seek Parliamentary honours. You subscribe liberally to the funds of your party, and by-and-by a constituency is found for you to contest. You lose the fight and subscribe again; another constituency is found for you, and you win by the skin of your teeth or with a plumping majority, as the case may be. You are now a full-blown member of Parliament; it is worth the money and much better than being a mayor. Up to this time you have been an orator of sorts. You have held forth from schoolroom platforms and the tops of waggons what time the assembled populace shouted and threw up its sweaty nightcaps. You have been carried shoulder high behind brass bands rendering _See, the Conquering Hero Comes_. Now however, you are really in Parliament; and for the nonce--for several years, in fact--you must give up talking. There is plenty for you to do; you may put questions on the paper, you may get a look in at committee work, you may show electors round the Houses, and you may go on subscribing liberally to the party funds. When you have subscribed enough, it is just within the bounds of possibility that the heads of the party--the Front Bench people, as it were--will begin to discover that there is virtue in you. You will be encouraged to make a speech or two at the slackest part of debates, and some fine day you may be entrusted with the fortunes of a little Bill which your party wishes to rush through. All the while you are subscribing liberally to the party funds. After many years, when you are least expecting it, the bottom seems to fall out of the universe--that is to say, there is a General Election. You have to fight your seat; you win; you come nobly back; behold, your party is in power.