ommons are
selected in a vague way or because they are a vague kind of men, that
they fail to represent the people.

The third reason against having a House of Commons try to compel
business men to be good, by law, is its out-of-the-way position.

The out-of-the-way position that a Parliament occupies in getting
business men to be good, can be best considered, perhaps, by admitting
at the outset that a government really is one very real and genuine way
a great people may have of expressing themselves, of expressing what
they are like and what they want, and that business is another way.

Then the question narrows down. Which way of expressing the people is
the one that expresses them the most to the point, and which expresses
them where their being expressed counts the most?

The people have a Government. And the people have Business.

What is a Government for?

What is Business for?

Business is the occupation of finding out and anticipating what the
wants of the English people really are and of finding out ways of
supplying them.

The business men on Oxford Street hire twenty or thirty thousand men and
women, keep them at work eight or nine hours a day, five or six days in
a week, finding out what the things are that the English people want
and reporting on them and supplying them.

They are naturally in a strategic position to find out, not only what
kinds of things the people want, but to find out, too, just how they
want the things placed before them, what kind of storekeepers and
manufacturers, salesmen and saleswomen they tolerate, like to deal with
and prefer to have prosper.

And the business men are not only in the most strategic and competent
position to find out what the people who buy want, but to find out too,
what the people who sell want. They are in the best position to know,
and to know intimately, what the salesmen and saleswomen want and what
they want to be and what they want to do or not do.

They are in a close and watchful position, too, with regard to the
conditions in the factories from which their goods come and with regard
to what the employers, stockholders, foremen and workmen in those
factories want.

What is more to the point, these same business men, when they have once
found out just what it is the people want, are the only men who are in a
position, all in the same breath, without asking anybody and without
arguing with anybody, without meddling or convincing anybody--to