On Saturnalia
word "Misrule." Anyhow, it is Saturnalia now, and Saturnalia it shall he here.
If a man were to come back from the past and watch the modern world into which he had tumbled he would note any number of things that would, I am certain, intoxicate him with wonder and delight. Just as one is intoxicated with wonder and delight on landing in youth upon the quays of a foreign port for the first time—that is, if the foreign port is well governed, for there is no wonder or delight either in barbarism or in decay. Such a man would be perpetually running to telephones, those curious toys, and marvelling at cinematographs and rejoicing in express trains and clear print and big guns and phonographs; he couldn't help it. Motor-cars moving by themselves would fill him with magic—but he would bitterly mislike certain absences, and he would complain that half a dozen things were very wrong with the world. So many men free and yet owning nothing—so much the greater part of men free and yet owning nothing—would seem to him a monstrous and perilous thing. The exact and mechanical accuracy that clocks and railways have made would offend him; he would see it as a disease wearing out men's nerves. The modern arguments all in a circle round and round the old insoluble problems would bore him dreadfully, and still more perhaps the fresh discoveries every week of principles and plain truths as old as the Mediterranean—but nothing surely would as-
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