Street could be relied on to do
better.

Keeping the polls open once in so often, a few hours, and using hearsay
and little slips of paper--anybody dropping in--seems a rather fluttery
and uncertain way to pick out the representatives of the people, after
one has considered three blocks of Oxford Street.

The next thing the crowd is going to do in getting what it wants from
business men is to deal directly with the business men themselves and
stop feeling, what many people feel partly from habit, perhaps, that the
only way the crowd can get to what it wants is to go way over or way
back or way around by Robin Hood's barn or the House of Commons.

But there is a second reason:

The trouble is not merely in the way men who sit in the House of Commons
are selected. The real deep-seated trouble with the men who sit in the
House of Commons is that they like it. The difficulty (as in the
American Congress too) seems to be something in the men themselves. It
lies in what might be called, for lack of a better name, perhaps, the
Hem and Haw or Parliament Temperament.

The dominating type of man in all the world's legislative bodies, for
the time being, seems to be the considerer or reconsiderer, the man who
dotes on the little and tiddly sides of great problems. The greatness of
the problem furnishes, of course, the pleasant, pale glow, the happy
sense of importance to a man, and then there is all the jolly littleness
of the little things besides--the little things that a little man can
make look big by getting them in the way of big ones--a great nation
looking on and waiting.... For such a man there always seems to be a
certain coziness and hominess in a Legislative Body....

As a seat in the House of Commons not unnaturally--every year it is
hemmed or hawed in, gets farther and farther away from the people, it is
becoming more and more apparent to the people every year that the
Members of their House of Commons as a class are unlikely to do anything
of a very striking or important or lasting value in the way of getting
business men to be good.

The more efficient and practical business men are coming to suspect that
the members of the House of Commons, speaking broadly, do not know the
will of the people, and that they could not express it in creative,
straightforward and affirmative laws if they did.

CHAPTER II

OXFORD STREET HUMS. THE HOUSE HEMS

But it is not only because the members of the House of C