One of the bothers of writing is that words carry about upon their backs nowadays a great pack of past meanings and derivations, and that--particularly to-day--no word is standing still as it were and meaning something once and for all which a plain man can say without being laughed at for ignorance or for affectation. For instance, Saturnalia. To one man it means a certain bundle of ritual many centuries dead, common to a particular district of Italy and practised in midwinter. To another man it means a lot of poor people having an exaggerated beanfeast and thereby annoying the rich people. But it does not mean either of these things to the plain man. It means to the plain man occasion and specific occasion for turning things upside down and getting breathing space for a while from the crushing order of this world. That is what “Saturnalia” means to the ordinary user of the word, and note, he has no other word by which to express the idea--so thoroughly has the thing died out since modern English was formed. I suppose the nearest word for it in English--when such feasts were still known in England--was the vague word “Misrule.” Anyhow, it is Saturnalia now, and Saturnalia it shall be here. If a man were to come back from the past and watch the modern world into which he had tumbled he would note any number of things that would, I am certain, intoxicate him with wonder and delight. Just as one is intoxicated with wonder and delight on landing in youth upon the quays of a foreign port for the first time--that is, if the foreign port is well governed, for there is no wonder or delight either in barbarism or in decay. Such a man would be perpetually running to telephones, those curious toys, and marvelling at cinematographs and rejoicing in express trains and clear print and big guns and phonographs; he couldn’t help it. Motor-cars moving by themselves would fill him with magic--but he would bitterly mislike certain absences, and he would complain that half a dozen things were very wrong with the world. So many men free and yet owning nothing--so much the greater part of men free and yet owning nothing--would seem to him a monstrous and perilous thing. The exact and mechanical accuracy that clocks and railways have made would offend him; he would see it as a disease wearing out men’s nerves. The modern arguments all in a circle round and round the old insoluble problems would bore him dreadfully, and still more perhaps the fresh discoveries every week of principles and plain truths as old as the Mediterranean--but nothing surely would astonish him or grieve him or frighten him more than the absence of topsy-turvydom without some recurrent breath of which the soul of man perishes.