like a brother, but I want an English
cabman, who will be funny and ask me what his fare 'is.' Your bugles
stir my blood, but I want to see a London policeman. Take, oh, take me
to see a London policeman."

He stood quite dark and still against the end of the sunset, and I could
not tell whether he understood or not. I got back into his carriage.

"You will understand," I said, "if ever you are an exile even for
pleasure. The child to his mother, the man to his country, as a
countryman of yours once said. But since, perhaps, it is rather too long
a drive to the English end of the world, we may as well drive back to
Besancon."

Only as the stars came out among those immortal hills I wept for Walham
Green.

IX. In the Place de La Bastille

On the first of May I was sitting outside a cafe in the Place de
la Bastille in Paris staring at the exultant column, crowned with a
capering figure, which stands in the place where the people destroyed a
prison and ended an age. The thing is a curious example of how symbolic
is the great part of human history. As a matter of mere material fact,
the Bastille when it was taken was not a horrible prison; it was hardly
a prison at all. But it was a symbol, and the people always go by a
sure instinct for symbols; for the Chinaman, for instance, at the last
General Election, or for President Kruger's hat in the election before;
their poetic sense is perfect. The Chinaman with his pigtail is not
an idle flippancy. He does typify with a compact precision exactly
the thing the people resent in African policy, the alien and grotesque
nature of the power of wealth, the fact that money has no roots, that it
is not a natural and familiar power, but a sort of airy and evil magic
calling monsters from the ends of the earth. The people hate the mine
owner who can bring a Chinaman flying across the sea, exactly as the
people hated the wizard who could fetch a flying dragon through the air.
It was the same with Mr. Kruger's hat. His hat (that admirable hat) was
not merely a joke. It did symbolise, and symbolise extremely well, the
exact thing which our people at that moment regarded with impatience and
venom; the old-fashioned, dingy, Republican simplicity, the unbeautiful
dignity of the bourgeois, and the heavier truisms of political morality.
No; the people are sometimes wrong on the practical side of politics;
they are never wrong on the artistic side.

.....

So it was, certainly, wit