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 concern, would be willing to trust his interest or would really expect the people, all the people as a whole, to be represented or to get what they wanted, to act definitely and efficiently through the vague generalizations of the polls.  Perhaps a natural selection, a dead-earnest rigorous, selection that men work on nine hours a day, an implacable, unremitting process during working hours, of sorting men out (which we call business), is the crowd’s most reliable way of registering what it definitely thinks about the men it wants to represent it.  Business is the crowd’s, big, serious, daily voting in pounds, shillings, and pence—­its hour to hour, unceasing, intimate, detailed labour in picking men out, in putting at the top the men it can work with best, the men who most express it, who have the most genius to serve crowds, to reveal to crowds their own minds, and supply to them what they want.

As full as it is—­like all broad, honest expressions, of human shortcomings and of things that are soon to be stopped, it does remain to be said that business, in a huge, rough way, daily expressing the crowds as far as they have got—­the best in them and the worst in them, is, after all, their most faithful and true record, their handwriting.  Business is the crowds’ autograph—­its huge, slow, clumsy signature upon our world.

Buying and selling is the life blood of the crowds’ thought, its big, brutal daily confiding to us of its view of human life.  What do the crowds, poor and rich, really believe about life?  Property is the last will and testament of Crowds.

The man-sorting that goes on in distributing and producing property is the Crowd’s most unremitting, most normal, temperamental way of determining and selecting its most efficient and valuable leaders—­its men who can express it, and who can act for it.

This is the first reason I would give against letting the people rely on having a House of Commons compel business men to be good.

Men who meet now and again during the year, afternoons or evenings, who have been picked out to be at the top of the nation’s talking, by a loose absent-minded and illogical paper-process, cannot expect to control men who have been picked out to be at the top of a nation’s buying and selling, by a hard-working, closely fitting, logical process—­the men that all the people by everything they do, every day, all day, have picked out to represent them.

Any chance three blocks of Oxford Street could be relied on to do better.