y Oxford
Street says things, in a few straight, clean-cut, ordinary words, in
long quiet rows of deeds, of buying and selling and acting?

Pounds, shillings, and silence.

Then on to the next thing.

If the House of Commons were more like Oxford Street or even if it had
suddenly something of the tone of Oxford Street, if suddenly it were to
begin some fine morning to express England the way Oxford Street does,
would not one see, in less than three months, new kinds and new sizes of
men all over England, wanting to belong to it?

Big, powerful, uncompromising, creative men who have no time for
twiddling, who never would have dreamed of being tucked away in the
house of Commons before, would want to belong to it.

In the meantime, of course, the men of England who have empires to
express, are not unnaturally expressing them in more simple language
like foundries, soap factories around a world, tungsten mines,
department stores, banks, subways, railroads for seventy nations, and
ships on seven seas, Winnipeg trolleys and little New York skyscrapers.

Business men of the more usual or humdrum kind could not do it, but
certainly, the first day that business men like these, of the first or
world-size class, once find the House of Commons a place they like to be
in, once begin expressing the genius of the English people in government
as they are already expressing the genius of the English people in
owning the earth, in buying and selling, in inventing things and in
inventing corporations, the House of Commons will cease to be a bog of
words, an abyss of committees, and legislation will begin to be run like
a railroad--on a block signal system, rows of things taken up, gone
over, and finished. The click of the signal. Then the next thing.

I sit in my club and look out of the window and think. Just outside
thousands of taxies shooting all these little mighty wills of men across
my window, across London, across England, across the world ... the huge,
imperious street ... all these men hurling themselves about in it,
joining their wills on to telephone wires, to mighty trains and little
quiet country roads, hitching up cables to their wills, and
ships--hitching up the very clouds over the sea to their wills and
running a world--why are not men like these--men who have the
street-spirit in them, this motor genius of driving through to what they
want, taking seats in the House of Commons?

Perhaps Oxford Street is more ef