Читать книгу The Oaken Heart онлайн

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The job of running the country is so important that only the best men at their best are safe to be left with it, and our anxiety about their capabilities before they get the appointment is boundless. Once they are on the job, however, it is a rule, born out of long experience and so firmly implanted that it has become a sort of instinct, that we stand back and let them get on with it unmolested until and unless things look really dangerous.

This does not mean that we lose interest, of course, or that we have no other hand in the matter. On the contrary, our part is often very arduous. In our experience, we have to watch for the little indications they give us to show us how they want us to play up. As many of these indications have to be invisible to the foreigner, our joint performance is not without merit.

Naturally I am not talking now about those politically minded folk who form themselves into groups and do good or bad work as the case may be, nor to the M.P. who will never be a statesman and who thinks of us and treats us as if we were always an election crowd, which is absurd. All this only applies to the ordinary person, the chap who only thinks of himself as British and East Anglian and as nothing else, whose social class doesn't bother him either way, who votes sometimes for one party and sometimes for another, who plods along steadily towards what he hopes to God is peace, freedom and that glorious economic state which is always to have five bob to spare, and who corrects his mistakes and reforms his judgments as he goes. His ideal major-domo is the statesman who knows and loves his country and who never makes the mistake of underestimating his employer, either in intelligence or strength.