rical in the worst sense of that
term, objected 'What a commentary was that on the "will of the
people,"'[80] and thought it somehow illegitimate that Mr. Samuel should
not defend democracy according to the philosophy of Thomas Paine, so
that he could answer in the style of Canning. The present quarrel
between the two Houses may indeed result in a further step in the public
control of the methods of producing political opinion by the
substitution of General Elections occurring at regular intervals for our
present system of sudden party dissolutions at moments of national
excitement.

[80] _Times_, June 25, 1907.

But in the electoral process, as in so many other cases, one dares not
hope that these slow and half-conscious changes in the general
intellectual attitude will be sufficient to suggest and carry through
all the improvements of machinery necessary to meet our growing
difficulties, unless they are quickened by a conscious purpose. At my
last contest for the London County Council I had to spend the half hour
before the close of the vote in one of the polling stations of a very
poor district. I was watching the proceedings, which in the crush at the
end are apt to be rather irregular, and at the same time was thinking of
this book. The voters who came in were the results of the 'final rally'
of the canvassers on both sides. They entered the room in rapid but
irregular succession, as if they were jerked forward by a hurried and
inefficient machine. About half of them were women, with broken straw
hats, pallid faces, and untidy hair. All were dazed and bewildered,
having been snatched away in carriages or motors from the making of
match-boxes, or button-holes, or cheap furniture, or from the public
house, or, since it was Saturday evening, from bed. Most of them seemed
to be trying, in the unfamiliar surroundings, to be sure of the name for
which, as they had been reminded at the door, they were to vote. A few
were drunk, and one man, who was apparently a supporter of my own, clung
to my neck while he tried to tell me of some vaguely tremendous fact
which just eluded his power of speech. I was very anxious to win, and
inclined to think that I had won, but my chief feeling was an intense
conviction that this could not be accepted as even a decently
satisfactory method of creating a government for a city of five million
inhabitants, and that nothing short of a conscious and resolute facing
of the whole problem of th