The New Jerusalem | Page 6

free and equal. When the idea of equal citizenship returned to the world,
it found that world changed by a much more mysterious version of
equality. So that London, handing on the lamp from Paris as well as
Rome, is faced with a new problem touching the old practice of getting
the work of the world done somehow. We have now to assume not only
that all citizens are equal, but that all men are citizens. Capitalism
attempted it by combining political equality with economic inequality;
it assumed the rich could always hire the poor. But Capitalism seems to
me to have collapsed; to be not only a discredited ethic but a bankrupt
business. Whether we shall return to pagan slavery, or to small property,
or by guilds or otherwise get to work in a new way, is not the question
here. The question here was the one I asked myself standing on that
green mound beside the yellow river; and the answer to it lay ahead of
me, along the road that ran towards the rising sun.
What made the difference? What was it that had happened between the
rise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the French Republic? Why
did the equal citizens of the first take it for granted that there would be
slaves? Why did the equal citizens of the second take it for granted that
there would not be slaves? How had this immemorial institution
disappeared in the interval, so that nobody even dreamed of it or
suggested it? How was it that when equality returned, it was no longer
the equality of citizens, and had to be the equality of men? The answer
is that this equality of men is in more senses than one a mystery. It is a
mystery which I pondered as I stood in the corridor of the train going
south from Rome. It was at daybreak, and (as it happened) before any
one else had risen, that I looked out of the long row of windows across
a great landscape grey with olives and still dark against the dawn. The
dawn itself looked rather like a row of wonderful windows; a line of

low casements unshuttered and shining under the eaves of cloud. There
was a curious clarity about the sunrise; as if its sun might be made of
glass rather than gold. It was the first time I had seen so closely and
covering such a landscape the grey convolutions and hoary foliage of
the olive; and all those twisted trees went by like a dance of dragons in
a dream. The rocking railway-train and the vanishing railway-line
seemed to be going due east, as if disappearing into the sun; and save
for the noise of the train there was no sound in all that grey and silver
solitude; not even the sound of a bird. Yet the plantations were mostly
marked out in private plots and bore every trace of the care of private
owners. It is seldom, I confess, that I so catch the world asleep, nor do I
know why my answer should have come to me thus when I was myself
only half-awake. It is common in such a case to see some new signal or
landmark; but in my experience it is rather the things already grown
familiar that suddenly grow strange and significant. A million olives
must have flashed by before I saw the first olive; the first, so to speak,
which really waved the olive branch. For I remembered at last to what
land I was going; and I knew the name of the magic which had made all
those peasants out of pagan slaves, and has presented to the modern
world a new problem of labour and liberty. It was as if I already saw
against the clouds of daybreak that mountain which takes its title from
the olive: and standing half visible upon it, a figure at which I did not
look. _Ex oriente lux_; and I knew what dawn had broken over the
ruins of Rome.
I have taken but this one text or label, out of a hundred such, the matter
of labour and liberty; and thought it worth while to trace it from one
blatant and bewildering yellow poster in the London streets to its high
places in history. But it is only one example of the way in which a
thousand things grouped themselves and fell into perspective as I
passed farther and farther from them, and drew near the central origins
of civilisation. I do not say that I saw the solution; but I saw the
problem. In the litter of journalism and the chatter of politics, it is too
much of a puzzle even to be a problem. For instance, a friend