What made the difference? What was it that had happened
between the rise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the
French Republic? Why did the equal citizens of the first take it
for granted that there would be slaves? Why did the equal citizens
of the second take it for granted that there would not be slaves?
How had this immemorial institution disappeared in the interval,
so that nobody even dreamed of it or suggested it? How was it that
when equality returned, it was no longer the equality of citizens,
and had to be the equality of men? The answer is that this equality
of men is in more senses than one a mystery. It is a mystery which I
pondered as I stood in the corridor of the train going south from Rome.
It was at daybreak, and (as it happened) before any one else
had risen, that I looked out of the long row of windows across
a great landscape grey with olives and still dark against the dawn.
The dawn itself looked rather like a row of wonderful windows;
a line of low casements unshuttered and shining under the eaves
of cloud. There was a curious clarity about the sunrise;
as if its sun might be made of glass rather than gold.
It was the first time I had seen so closely and covering such
a landscape the grey convolutions and hoary foliage of the olive;
and all those twisted trees went by like a dance of dragons in a dream.
The rocking railway-train and the vanishing railway-line seemed to be
going due east, as if disappearing into the sun; and save for the noise
of the train there was no sound in all that grey and silver solitude;
not even the sound of a bird. Yet the plantations were mostly marked
out in private plots and bore every trace of the care of private owners.
It is seldom, I confess, that I so catch the world asleep,
nor do I know why my answer should have come to me thus when I was
myself only half-awake. It is common in such a case to see some new