In truth everything I saw told me that there was a large misunderstanding everywhere; a misunderstanding amounting to a mess.  And as this was the last impression that London left on me, so it was the impression I carried with me about the whole modern problem of Western civilisation, as a riddle to be read or a knot to be untied.  To untie it it is necessary to get hold of the right end of it, and especially the other end of it.  We must begin at the beginning; we must return to our first origins in history, as we must return to our first principles in philosophy.  We must consider how we came to be doing what we do, and even saying what we say.  As it is, the very terms we use are either meaningless or something more than meaningless, inconsistent even with themselves.  This applies, for instance, to the talk of both sides in that Labour controversy, which I merely took in passing, because it was the current controversy in London when I left.  The Capitalists say Bolshevism as one might say Boojum.  It is merely a mystical and imaginative word suggesting horror.  But it might mean many things; including some just and rational things.  On the other hand, there could never be any meaning at all in the phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat.”  It is like saying, “the omnipotence of omnibus-conductors.”  It is fairly obvious that if an omnibus-conductor were omnipotent, he would probably prefer to conduct something else besides an omnibus.  Whatever its exponents mean, it is clearly something different 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