The Other Kind Of man

There are some who are conciliated by Conciliation Boards. There are some
who, when they hear of Royal Commissions, breathe again--or snore again.
There are those who look forward to Compulsory Arbitration Courts as to
the islands of the blest. These men do not understand the day that they
look upon or the sights that their eyes have seen.

The almost sacramental idea of representation, by which the few may
incarnate the many, arose in the Middle Ages, and has done great things
for justice and liberty. It has had its real hours of triumph, as when
the States General met to renew France's youth like the eagle's; or when
all the virtues of the Republic fought and ruled in the figure of
Washington. It is not having one of its hours of triumph now. The real
democratic unrest at this moment is not an extension of the representative
process, but rather a revolt against it. It is no good giving those now
in revolt more boards and committees and compulsory regulations. It is
against these very things that they are revolting. Men are not only
rising against their oppressors, but against their representatives or, as
they would say, their misrepresentatives. The inner and actual spirit of
workaday England is coming out not in applause, but in anger, as a god who
should come out of his tabernacle to rebuke and confound his priests.

There is a certain kind of man whom we see many times in a day, but whom
we do not, in general, bother very much about. He is the kind of man of
whom his wife says that a better husband when he's sober you couldn't have.
She sometimes adds that he never is sober; but this is in anger and
exaggeration. Really he drinks much less and works much more than the
modern legend supposes. But it is quite true that he has not the horror
of bodily outbreak, natural to the classes that contain ladies; and it is
quite true that he never has that alert and inventive sort of industry
natural to the classes from which men can climb into great wealth. He has
grown, partly by necessity, but partly also by temper, accustomed to have
dirty clothes and dirty hands normally and without discomfort. He regards
cleanliness as a kind of separate and special costume; to be put on for
great festivals. He has several really curious characteristics, which
would attract the eyes of sociologists, if they had any eyes. For
instance, his vocabulary is coarse and abusive, in marked contrast to his
actual spirit, which is generally patient and civil. He has an odd way of
using certain words of really horrible meaning, but using them quite
innocently and without the most distant taint of the evils to which they
allude. He is rather sentimental; and, like most sentimental people, not
devoid of snobbishness. At the same time, he