s will not
have rules--they will have rulers. Preferring personal government, with
its tact and flexibility, is called Royalism. Preferring impersonal
government, with its dogmas and definitions, is called Republicanism.
Objecting broadmindedly both to kings and creeds is called Bosh; at
least, I know no more philosophic word for it. You can be guided by
the shrewdness or presence of mind of one ruler, or by the equality and
ascertained justice of one rule; but you must have one or the other,
or you are not a nation, but a nasty mess. Now men in their aspect of
equality and debate adore the idea of rules; they develop and complicate
them greatly to excess. A man finds far more regulations and definitions
in his club, where there are rules, than in his home, where there is
a ruler. A deliberate assembly, the House of Commons, for instance,
carries this mummery to the point of a methodical madness. The whole
system is stiff with rigid unreason; like the Royal Court in Lewis
Carroll. You would think the Speaker would speak; therefore he is mostly
silent. You would think a man would take off his hat to stop and put it
on to go away; therefore he takes off his hat to walk out and puts it on
to stop in. Names are forbidden, and a man must call his own father
"my right honorable friend the member for West Birmingham." These are,
perhaps, fantasies of decay: but fundamentally they answer a masculine
appetite. Men feel that rules, even if irrational, are universal; men
feel that law is equal, even when it is not equitable. There is a wild
fairness in the thing--as there is in tossing up.

Again, it is gravely unfortunate that when critics do attack such cases
as the Commons it is always on the points (perhaps the few points) where
the Commons are right. They denounce the House as the Talking-Shop,
and complain that it wastes time in wordy mazes. Now this is just one
respect in which the Commons are actually like the Common People. If
they love leisure and long debate, it is because all men love it; that
they really represent England. There the Parliament does approach to the
virile virtues of the pothouse.

The real truth is that adumbrated in the introductory section when we
spoke of the sense of home and property, as now we speak of the sense
of counsel and community. All men do naturally love the idea of leisure,
laughter, loud and equal argument; but there stands a specter in our
hall. We are conscious of the towering moder