n art-form for expressing a great people,
Oxford Street is not all that it should be, but there is certainly
something, after all the mooniness and the dim droniness, and
lawyer-mindedness in the way the English people express themselves or
think that they ought to express themselves in their house of
Commons--there is certainly something that makes Oxford Street seem
suddenly a fine, free, candid way for a great people to talk! And there
is all the gusto, too, the 'busses, the taxies, the hundreds of
thousands of men and women saying things and buying things they believe.

Taking in the shops on both sides or the street, and taking in the
things the people are doing behind the counters, and in the aisles, and
up in the office windows three blocks of Oxford Street really express
what the English people really want and what they really think and what
they believe and put up money on, more than three years of the house of
Commons.

If I were an Englishman I would rather be elected to walk up and down
Oxford Street and read what I saw there than to be elected to a seat in
the House of Commons, and I could accomplish more and learn more for a
nation, with three blocks of Oxford Street, with what I could gather up
and read there, and with what I could resent and believe there, than I
could with three years of the House of Commons.

I know that anybody, of course, could be elected to walk up and down
Oxford Street. But it is enough for me.

So I almost always try it after the house of Commons.

And when I have taken a little swing down Oxford Street and got the
House of Commons out of my system a little, perhaps I go down to the
Embankment, and drop into my club.

Then I sit in the window and mull.

If the English people express themselves and express what they want and
what they are bound to have, on Oxford Street and put their money down
for it, so much better than they do in the House of Commons, why should
they not do it there?

Why should elaborate, roundabout, mysterious things like governments,
that have to be spoken of in whispers (and that express themselves
usually in a kind of lawyer-minded way, in picked and dried words like
wills), be looked upon so seriously, and be taken on the whole, as the
main reliance the people have, in a great nation, for expressing
themselves?

Why should not a great people be allowed to say what they are like and
to say what they want and what they are bound to get, in the wa