in the Roman Empire and of energy in the British Empire.  I saw the Baths of Caracalla, witnessing to a cult of cleanliness, adduced also to prove the luxury of Ancient Romans and the simplicity of Anglo-Saxons.  All it really proves either way is a love of washing on a large scale; which might merely indicate that Caracalla, like other Emperors, was a lunatic.  But indeed what such things do indicate, if only indirectly, is something which is here much more important.  They indicate not only a sincerity in the public spirit, but a certain smoothness in the public services.  In a word, while there were many revolutions, there were no strikes.  The citizens were often rebels; but there were men who were not rebels, because they were not citizens.  The ancient world forced a number of people to do the work of the world first, before it allowed more privileged people to fight about the government of the world.  The truth is trite enough, of course; it is in the single word Slavery, which is not the name of a crime like Simony, but rather of a scheme like Socialism.  Sometimes very like Socialism.

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.