Only standing idly on one of those grassy mounds under one of
those broken arches, I suddenly saw the Labour problem of London,
as I could not see it in London. I do not mean that I saw which side
was right, or what solution was reliable, or any partisan points
or repartees, or any practical details about practical difficulties.
I mean that I saw what it was; the thing itself and the whole thing.
The Labour problem of to-day stood up quite simply, like a
peak at which a man looks back and sees single and solid,
though when he was walking over it it was a wilderness of rocks.
The Labour problem is the attempt to have the democracy of Paris
without the slavery of Rome. Between the Roman Republic and the
French Republic something had happened. Whatever else it was, it was
the abandonment of the ancient and fundamental human habit of slavery;
the numbering of men for necessary labour as the normal foundation
of 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.