Читать книгу The Oaken Heart онлайн

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Still, if we are very busy living our own lives and governing our own castles, we do keep an eye on our own politicians, noting carefully from their antics which way the wind blows. The relationship between the ordinary countryman and the politician is so seldom mentioned at home that it may be often misunderstood abroad. One sees frequent references to the fickleness of the public towards its leaders and to the short memory of the common man.

From childhood these observations have seemed to me to be wildly misleading. To begin with, the one thing we have obviously not got is a short memory. Some of our memories are so long that they embrace our fathers' and grandfathers' as well, while that word "leader" is largely a politeness.

The ordinary English countryman, in Auburn at any rate, has a very clear idea of democratic government. I doubt if he thinks of it in the Greek, but to his eyes it seems fairly clear that the country is governed by the public in the end, call it by what name you like. We--me and thee and the parson and all the other lads of the village--constitute the public, and the politicians are our servants. They apply for the job (often rather obsequiously we notice with instant suspicion), we give it to them, we pay them in honours or cash, and we judge them solely by results. Sometimes we come to a bad patch when the men applying for this all-important work are not quite all we could have desired. There has been a patch like that these twenty years, and some of us cannot forget that lost generation in 1914-15. We lost too much good stuff there, stuff we could very well have done with now. Still, as we say so truly if inelegantly, "If you can't get fat bacon, you must do with bread and pull-it and take the best there is to give you."