society, even a society in which citizens were 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