from what they say; and even this verbal inconsistency, this mere
welter of words, is a sign of the common confusion of thought.
It is this sort of thing that made London seem like a limbo
of lost words, and possibly of lost wits. And it is here we find
the value of what I have called walking backwards through history.

It is one of the rare merits of modern mechanical travel that it
enables us to compare widely different cities in rapid succession.
The stages of my own progress were the chief cities of
separate countries; and though more is lost in missing the countries,
something is gained in so sharply contrasting the capitals.
And again it was one of the advantages of my own progress that it
was a progress backwards; that it happened, as I have said,
to retrace the course of history to older and older things;
to Paris and to Rome and to Egypt, and almost, as it were, to Eden.
And finally it is one of the advantages of such a return that it
did really begin to clarify the confusion of names and notions
in modern society. I first became conscious of this when I
went out of the Gare de Lyon and walked along a row of cafes,
until I saw again a distant column crowned with a dancing figure;
the freedom that danced over the fall of the Bastille.
Here at least, I thought, is an origin and a standard,
such as I missed in the mere muddle of industrial opportunism.
The modern industrial world is not in the least democratic; but it is
supposed to be democratic, or supposed to be trying to be democratic.
The ninth century, the time of the Norse invasions, was not saintly
in the sense of being filled with saints; it was filled with pirates
and petty tyrants, and the first feudal anarchy. But sanctity
was the only ideal those barbarians had, when they had any at all.
And democracy is the only ideal the industrial millions have,