ical, for it was night, and I could only expect to see the stars,
which might have reminded me of Old Glory; but that was not the sign
that oppressed me. All the ground was a wilderness of stone and all the
buildings a forest of brick; I was far in the interior of a labyrinth of
lifeless things. Only, looking up, between two black chimneys and a
telegraph pole, I saw vast and far and faint, as the first men saw it,
the silver pattern of the Plough.

_The American Business Man_

It is a commonplace that men are all agreed in using symbols, and all
differ about the meaning of the symbols. It is obvious that a Russian
republican might come to identify the eagle as a bird of empire and
therefore a bird of prey. But when he ultimately escaped to the land of
the free, he might find the same bird on the American coinage figuring
as a bird of freedom. Doubtless, he might find many other things to
surprise him in the land of the free, and many calculated to make him
think that the bird, if not imperial, was at least rather imperious. But
I am not discussing those exceptional details here. It is equally
obvious that a Russian reactionary might cross the world with a vow of
vengeance against the red flag. But that authoritarian might have some
difficulties with the authorities, if he shot a man for using the red
flag on the railway between Willesden and Clapham Junction.

But, of course, the difficulty about symbols is generally much more
subtle than in these simple cases. I have remarked elsewhere that the
first thing which a traveller should write about is the thing which he
has not read about. It may be a small or secondary thing, but it is a
thing that he has seen and not merely expected to see.

I gave the example of the great multitude of wooden houses in America;
we might say of wooden towns and wooden cities. But after he has seen
such things, his next duty is to see the meaning of them; and here a
great deal of complication and controversy is possible. The thing
probably does not mean what he first supposes it to mean on the face of
it; but even on the face of it, it might mean many different and even
opposite things.

For instance, a wooden house might suggest an almost savage solitude; a
rude shanty put together by a pioneer in a forest; or it might mean a
very recent and rapid solution of the housing problem, conducted cheaply
and therefore on a very large scale. A wooden house might suggest the
very newes