And why? There is a question you may ask some time before it will be answered. One thing is sure, though the sureness of it reposes on some base we cannot see: in the proportion that men are secure of their philosophy and social scheme, in that proportion they must in some fixed manner turn it upside down from time to time for their delight and show it on a stage or enact it in a religious ritual with all its rules reversed and the whole thing wrong way about. They have always done this in healthy States, and if ever our State gets healthy they will begin to do it again. It is a human craving, an intense craving--but why, it would be a business to say. It must not be imagined that the craving or the expression of it has passed from us to-day. They have no more passed from us than the desire for property or for the tilling of the land. But their corporate character is broken up, they appear sporadically in individuals only, and are therefore often evil. They appear in the irony which is an increasing feature of our letters, in mad freaks and outbreaks for which men strained beyond bearing are punished, and they appear in fantastic prophecies of a changed world. One sees that craving for a burst of misrule in quite unexpected enthusiasms for things remote from our lives, in great senseless mobs furious about minor things--the minor actions of a campaign or the minor details of law-making--in the public clamour about the misfortunes of some foreign prisoner or the politics of some alien State. One sees it in the men who suddenly start rules of life based on some careful negation of what all around them do, in the leaders and teachers who first note exactly what nearly all their fellow-beings eat or drink or wear, and then most loudly proclaim salvation to lie in _not_ eating, drinking, or wearing these obviously necessary things. The neighbours stare! And no wonder--for private Saturnalia are dangerously near to vice in the sane, in the weak to insanity. But true Saturnalia, public Saturnalia, were healthy because they were corporate. Custom and religion had dug a sort of channel into which all that emotion could commonly run, and in midwinter, when it had long been very dark, the mischiefs, the comic spirits came out of the woods and for some days possessed the souls of men, and these, by that possession, were purged and freed. So it was for hundreds upon hundreds of years--until quite the modern time. Why have we lost it, and how long must we wait for it to return? When the relations of slave and master seemed as obvious and necessary as seem to us (let us say) the reading of a daily paper or the taking of a train, yet the obvious and necessary routine was broken in midwinter, the slave was the master for a moment and the master a slave.