For there is and will be more and more a turn of total change in all our talk and writing about history.  Everything in the past was praised if it had led up to the present, and blamed if it would have led up to anything else.  In short everybody has been searching the past for the secret of our success.  Very soon everybody may be searching the past for the secret of our failure.  They may be talking in such terms as they use after a motor smash or a bankruptcy; where was the blunder?  They may be writing such books as generals write after a military defeat; whose was the fault?  The failure will be assumed even in being explained.

For industrialism is no longer a vulgar success.  On the contrary, it is now too tragic even to be vulgar.  Under the cloud of doom the modern city has taken on something of the dignity of Babel or Babylon.  Whether we call it the nemesis of Capitalism or the nightmare of Bolshevism makes no difference; the rich grumble as much as the poor; every one is discontented, and none more than those who are chiefly discontented with the discontent.  About that discord we are in perfect harmony; about that disease we all think alike, whatever we think of the diagnosis or the cure.  By whatever process in the past we might have come to the right place, practical facts in the present and future will prove more and more that we have come to the wrong place.  And for many a premonition will grow more and more of a probability; that we may or may not await another century or another world to see the New Jerusalem rebuilt and shining on our fields; but in the flesh we shall see Babylon fall.

But there is another way in which that metaphor of the forked road will make the position plain.  Medieval society was not the right place; it was only the right turning.  It was only the right road; or perhaps only the beginning of the right road.  The medieval age was very far from being the age in which everything went right.  It would be nearer the truth I mean to call it the age in which everything went wrong.  It was the moment when things might have developed well, and did develop badly.  Or rather, to be yet more exact, it was the moment when they were developing well, and yet they were driven to develop badly.  This was the history of all the medieval states and of none more than medieval Jerusalem; indeed there were signs of some serious idea of making it the model medieval state.  Of this notion of Jerusalem as the New Jerusalem, of the Utopian aspect of the adventure of the Latin Kingdom, something may be said in a moment.  But meanwhile there was a more important part played by Jerusalem, I think, in all that great progress and reaction which has left us the problem of modern Europe.  And the suggestion of it is bound up with the former suggestion, about the difference between the goal and the right road that might have led to it.  It is bound up with that quality of the civilisation in question, that it was potential rather than perfect; and there is no need to idealise it in order to regret it.  This peculiar part played by Jerusalem I mention merely as a suggestion; I might almost say a suspicion.  Anyhow, it is something of a guess; but I for one have found it a guide.