ficient and more characteristic in
expressing the genius and the will of the English people than the House
of Commons is because of the way in which the people select the men they
want to express them in Oxford Street.

It may be that the men the people have selected to be at the top of the
nation's law-making are not selected by as skillful, painstaking, or
thorough a process as the men who have been selected to be placed at the
top of the nation's buying and selling.

Possibly the reason the House of Commons does not express the will of
the people is, that its members are merely selected in a loose, vague
way and by merely counting noses.

Possibly, too, the men who are selected by a true, honest, direct,
natural selection to be the leaders and to free the energies and steer
the work of the people, the men who are selected to lead by being seen
and lived with and worked with all day, every day, are better selected
men than men who having been voted on on slips of paper, and having been
seen in newspaper paragraphs, travel up to London and begin
thoughtlessly running a world.

The business man drops into the House of Commons after the meeting of
his firm in Bond Street, Lombard Street, or Oxford Street and takes a
look at it. He sees before him a huge tool or piece of machinery--a body
of men intended to work together and to get certain grave, particular,
and important things done, that the people want done, and he does not
see how a great good-hearted chaos or welter, a kind of chance national
Weather of Human Nature like the House of Commons, can get the things
done.

So he confines himself more and more to business where he loses less
time in wondering what other people think or if they think at all, cuts
out the work he sees, and does it.

He thinks how it would be if things were turned around and if people
tried to get expressed in business in the loose way, the thoughtless
reverie of voting that they use in trying to get themselves expressed in
politics.

He thinks the stockholders of the Sunlight Soap Company, Limited, would
be considerably alarmed to have the president and superintendent and
treasurer and the buyers and salesmen of the company elected at the
polls by the people in the county or by popular suffrage. He thinks that
thousands of the hands as well as the stockholders would be alarmed too.
It does not seem to him that anybody, poor or rich, employer or
employee, in matters of grave personal