Part 52 (1/2)
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 cla.s.s 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 Commons 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 antic.i.p.ating 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 get it for them.
Finding out what people want and getting it for them is what may be called, controlling business.
The question not unnaturally arises with all these business men and their twenty or thirty thousand people working with them, eight or nine hours a day, five or six days a week, in controlling business, why should the members of the House of Commons expect, by taking a few afternoons or evenings off for it, to control business for them?
If I were an employee and if what I wanted to do was to improve the conditions of labour in my own calling, I do not think I would want to take the time to wait several months, probably, to convince my member of Parliament, and then wait a few months more for him to convince the other members of Parliament, and then vote his one vote. I would rather deal directly with my employer.
If my employer is on my back and if I can once get the attention of my employer himself, as to where he is and as to how he is interrupting what I am doing for him--if I once get his attention and once get him to notice my back, he can get down. No one else can get down for him and no one else, except by turning a whole nation all around, can make him get down. Why should a man bother with T.P.'s _Weekly_ or with Horatio Bottomley or with the _Daily Mail_ or the _Times_, with a score of other people's by-elections all over England to lift his own employer off his back?