The New Jerusalem | Page 3

again I am haunted by a dim human parallel. For
it seems to me that many of us, in just detestation of the dirty trick of
cruelty to animals, have really a great deal of patience with animals;
more patience, I fear, than many of us have with human beings.
Suppose I had to go out and catch my secretary in a field every
morning; and suppose my secretary always kicked me by way of
beginning the day's work; I wonder whether that day's work would

resume its normal course as if nothing had happened. Nothing graver
than these grotesque images and groping speculations would come into
my conscious mind just then, though at the back of it there was an
indescribable sense of regret and parting. All through my wanderings
the dog remained in my memory as a Dickensian and domestic emblem
of England; and if it is difficult to take a donkey seriously, it ought to
be easiest, at least, for a man who is going to Jerusalem.
There was a cloud of Christmas weather on the great grey beech-woods
and the silver cross of the cross-roads. For the four roads that meet in
the market-place of my little town make one of the largest and simplest
of such outlines on the map of England; and the shape as it shines on
that wooded chart always affects me in a singular fashion. The sight of
the cross-roads is in a true sense the sign of the cross. For it is the sign
of a truly Christian thing; that sharp combination of liberty and
limitation which we call choice. A man is entirely free to choose
between right and left, or between right and wrong. As I looked for the
last time at the pale roads under the load of cloud, I knew that our
civilisation had indeed come to the cross-roads. As the paths grew
fainter, fading under the gathering shadow, I felt rather as if it had lost
its way in a forest.
It was at the time when people were talking about some menace of the
end of the world, not apocalyptic but astronomical; and the cloud that
covered the little town of Beaconsfield might have fitted in with such a
fancy. It faded, however, as I left the place further behind; and in
London the weather, though wet, was comparatively clear. It was
almost as if Beaconsfield had a domestic day of judgment, and an end
of the world all to itself. In a sense Beaconsfield has four ends of the
world, for its four corners are named "ends" after the four nearest towns.
But I was concerned only with the one called London End; and the very
name of it was like a vision of some vain thing at once ultimate and
infinite. The very title of London End sounds like the other end of
nowhere, or (what is worse) of everywhere. It suggests a sort of
derisive riddle; where does London End? As I came up through the vast
vague suburbs, it was this sense of London as a shapeless and endless
muddle that chiefly filled my mind. I seemed still to carry the cloud

with me; and when I looked up, I almost expected to see the
chimney-pots as tangled as the trees.
And in truth if there was now no material fog, there was any amount of
mental and moral fog. The whole industrial world symbolised by
London had reached a curious complication and confusion, not easy to
parallel in human history. It is not a question of controversies, but
rather of cross-purposes. As I went by Charing Cross my eye caught a
poster about Labour politics, with something about the threat of Direct
Action and a demand for Nationalisation. And quite apart from the
merits of the case, it struck me that after all the direct action is very
indirect, and the thing demanded is many steps away from the thing
desired. It is all part of a sort of tangle, in which terms and things cut
across each other. The employers talk about "private enterprise," as if
there were anything private about modern enterprise. Its combines are
as big as many commonwealths; and things advertised in large letters
on the sky cannot plead the shy privileges of privacy. Meanwhile the
Labour men talk about the need to "nationalise" the mines or the land,
as if it were not the great difficulty in a plutocracy to nationalise the
Government, or even to nationalise the nation. The Capitalists praise
competition while they create monopoly; the Socialists urge a strike to
turn workmen into soldiers and state officials; which is logically a
strike against strikes. I merely mention it as an example of the
bewildering inconsistency, and for no controversial purpose. My own
sympathies