A Glimpse of My Country - Page 2

worse than many other people;
they speak worse than themselves. The ignorance of statesmen is
like the ignorance of judges, an artificial and affected thing.
If you have the good fortune really to talk with a statesman, you will
be constantly startled with his saying quite intelligent things.
It makes one nervous at first. And I have never been sufficiently
intimate with such a man to ask him why it was a rule of his life
in Parliament to appear sillier than he was.

It is the same with the voters. The average man votes below himself;
he votes with half a mind or with a hundredth part of one.
A man ought to vote with the whole of himself as he worships
or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart,
his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music;
also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet.
If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it
should creep into his vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs,
they should be in his ears when he makes the mystical cross.
But as it is, the difficulty with English democracy at all
elections is that it is something less than itself. The question
is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes.
The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.

. . . . .

This is the tragedy of England; you cannot judge it by its foremost men.
Its types do not typify. And on the occasion of which I speak
I found this to be so especially of that old intelligent middle
class which I had imagined had almost vanished from the world.
It seemed to me that all the main representatives of the middle
class had gone off in one direction or in the other; they had either
set out in pursuit of the Smart Set or they had set out in pursuit
of the Simple Life. I cannot say which I dislike more myself;
the people in question are welcome to have either of them, or, as is
more likely, to have both, in hideous alternations of disease and cure.
But all the prominent men who plainly represent the middle class have
adopted either the single eye-glass of Mr Chamberlain or the single
eye of Mr. Bernard Shaw.

The old class that I mean has no representative. Its food was plentiful;
but it had no show. Its food was plain; but it had no fads.
It was serious about politics; and when it spoke in public it
committed the solecism of trying to speak well. I thought that
this old earnest political England had practically disappeared.
And as I say, I took one turn out of Fleet Street and I found
a room full of it.

. . . . .

At the top of the room was a chair in which Johnson had sat. The club
was a club in which Wilkes had spoken, in a time when even the
ne'er-do-weel was virile. But all these things