It was at the time when people were talking about some menace of the end of the world, not apocalyptic but astronomical; and the cloud that covered the little town of Beaconsfield might have fitted in with such a fancy.  It faded, however, as I left the place further behind; and in London the weather, though wet, was comparatively clear.  It was almost as if Beaconsfield had a domestic day of judgment, and an end of the world all to itself.  In a sense Beaconsfield has four ends of the world, for its four corners are named “ends” after the four nearest towns.  But I was concerned only with the one called London End; and the very name of it was like a vision of some vain thing at once ultimate and infinite.  The very title of London End sounds like the other end of nowhere, or (what is worse) of everywhere.  It suggests a sort of derisive riddle; where does London End?  As I came up through the vast vague suburbs, it was this sense of London as a shapeless and endless muddle that chiefly filled my mind.  I seemed still to carry the cloud with me; and when I looked up, I almost expected to see the chimney-pots as tangled as the trees.

And in truth if there was now no material fog, there was any amount of mental and moral fog.  The whole industrial world symbolised by London had reached a curious complication and confusion, not easy to parallel in human history.  It is not a question of controversies, but rather of cross-purposes.  As I went by Charing Cross my eye caught a poster about Labour politics, with something about the threat of Direct Action and a demand for Nationalisation.  And quite apart from the merits of the case, it struck me that after all the direct action is very indirect, and the thing demanded is many steps away from the thing desired.  It is all part of a sort of tangle, in which terms and things cut across each other.  The employers talk about “private enterprise,” as if there were anything private about modern enterprise.  Its combines are as big as many commonwealths; and things advertised in large letters on the sky cannot plead the shy privileges of privacy.  Meanwhile the Labour men talk about the need to “nationalise” the mines or the land, as if it were not the great difficulty in a plutocracy to nationalise the Government, or even to nationalise the nation.  The Capitalists praise competition while they create monopoly; the Socialists urge a strike to turn workmen into soldiers and state officials; which is logically a strike against strikes.  I merely mention it as an example of the bewildering inconsistency, and for no controversial purpose.  My own sympathies are with the Socialists; in so far that there is something to be said for Socialism, and nothing to be said for Capitalism.  But the point is that when there is something to be said for one thing, it is now commonly said in support of the opposite thing.  Never since the mob called out, “Less bread!  More taxes!” in the nonsense story, has there been so truly nonsensical a situation as that in which the strikers demand Government control and the Government denounces its own control as anarchy.  The mob howls before the palace gates, “Hateful tyrant, we demand that you assume more despotic powers”; and the tyrant thunders from the balcony, “Vile rebels, do you dare to suggest that my powers should be extended?” There seems to be a little misunderstanding somewhere.