Snoring as a Fine Art by Albert Jay Nock

Author:Albert Jay Nock [Jay Nock, Albert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-61016-099-5
Publisher: Richard R. Smith Publisher, Inc.
Published: 1958-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

III

Again, how can the American voter be expected to have any interest in the doings of the Executive between elections, when the whole Executive is irresponsible and ungetatable by any means short of a congressional investigation, which takes dynamite to start, and is a matter of months spent in all sorts of futile and vexatious foolery?

The President picks his Cabinet where he likes, and they are utterly inaccessible; they cannot be seen or spoken to unless they choose, let alone called to account. The British Prime Minister must choose his Cabinet from the House, and they keep their seats in the House and can be called to account by any member. Once when I was in London a member got up at question-time, took an envelope out of his pocket, and said, “Mr. Speaker, I wish to ask the Postmaster-General,” who was sitting about fifteen feet in front of him, “why he did not deliver this letter on time.” The letter belonged to some constituent who had kicked about it to his representative, and got him to put the question. The Postmaster-General asked for time to look the matter up, and in a few days made his reply, and the thing was properly straightened out. He had to do that, or he would have lost his job.

That is the British equivalent of a congressional investigation, whether concerning a small matter like a delayed letter, or a large matter like a profiteering army contract. It is direct, simple, business-like. There you have the machinery of really representative and responsible government. The citizen who has that kind of machinery at his disposal can afford to be interested in politics because he knows he can get action and get it at once.

It is even conceivable that the government might have fallen on the apparently petty occasion of that delayed letter. Such a thing has happened, and it could happen again. Suppose the government has only a small majority and is not very popular; suppose the Opposition has smelt out a few disaffected votes that they think may turn the scale; suppose the Postmaster-General is evasive and does not give a straight answer. The leader of the Opposition makes a red-hot speech, asking Mr. Speaker what in Heaven’s name he thinks the Empire is coming to, when a venal and bungling government won’t let His Majesty’s loyal subjects get their mail. Some one on the government bench, perhaps the Prime Minister, replies as best he can—then a vote of “no confidence,” and down goes the government.

I was once told in London that one government had just missed destruction by the closest kind of shave, on what would seem to us the curious issue of a girl having been picked up by the police for soliciting. She told the police that she was a daughter of the rector of some church out in the country, that she had lost her direction on Piccadilly, and had stopped a stranger to ask her way. The police detained her overnight.

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