e distant hill suddenly go mad. We only know that there
is a real revolution because all the chimney-pots go mad on the whole
skyline of the city.

Just as the ragged outline of a tree grows suddenly more ragged and
rises into fantastic crests or tattered tails, so the human city rises
under the wind of the spirit into toppling temples or sudden spires. No
man has ever seen a revolution. Mobs pouring through the palaces, blood
pouring down the gutters, the guillotine lifted higher than the throne,
a prison in ruins, a people in arms--these things are not revolution,
but the results of revolution.

You cannot see a wind; you can only see that there is a wind. So,
also, you cannot see a revolution; you can only see that there is a
revolution. And there never has been in the history of the world a real
revolution, brutally active and decisive, which was not preceded by
unrest and new dogma in the reign of invisible things. All revolutions
began by being abstract. Most revolutions began by being quite
pedantically abstract.

The wind is up above the world before a twig on the tree has moved. So
there must always be a battle in the sky before there is a battle on the
earth. Since it is lawful to pray for the coming of the kingdom, it is
lawful also to pray for the coming of the revolution that shall restore
the kingdom. It is lawful to hope to hear the wind of Heaven in the
trees. It is lawful to pray "Thine anger come on earth as it is in
Heaven."

.....

The great human dogma, then, is that the wind moves the trees. The great
human heresy is that the trees move the wind. When people begin to
say that the material circumstances have alone created the moral
circumstances, then they have prevented all possibility of serious
change. For if my circumstances have made me wholly stupid, how can I be
certain even that I am right in altering those circumstances?

The man who represents all thought as an accident of environment is
simply smashing and discrediting all his own thoughts--including
that one. To treat the human mind as having an ultimate authority is
necessary to any kind of thinking, even free thinking. And nothing will
ever be reformed in this age or country unless we realise that the moral
fact comes first.

For example, most of us, I suppose, have seen in print and heard in
debating clubs an endless discussion that goes on between Socialists and
total abstainers. The latter say that drink leads to poverty; t