200 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

of tactics to pursue. Its elegance lay in the fact—too familiar to have
registered itself in any ordinary railwayman's consciousness—that the
continued operation of the Italian State Railways was dependent on the
continued observance of a tacit 'gentleman's agreement* between the
employees and the authorities that the regulations officially in force
were to be tactfully ignored. So, by simply carrying out their legal duties
for once in a way, the railwaymen could instantaneously bring the traffic
on the railways to a standstill without either forfeiting their pay or
rendering themselves liable to prosecution. No sooner said than done.
When the moment arrived for the morning express train to leave Milan
for Rome, and the guard duly blew his whistle, the driver correctly
waited to hear the same blast twice repeated at intervals of fifteen
minutes; and, when the train then did get under way, the driver, cor-
rectly again, accommodated the train's speed to the walking-pace of a
colleague who was likewise correctly carrying out the regulations by
advancing, ten paces ahead of the buffers of the locomotive, waving a red
flag held in his right hand to ensure the safety of the public while he was
tapping the rails with a hammer held in his left hand to ensure the safety
of the passengers. This sly 'cold war' could have only one outcome, and
the end came quickly. On receipt of a telegraphic report from the station-
master at Milan, the Ministry at Rome announced its unconditional
surrender.

Translating the Italian railwaymen's tactics from an economic to an
intellec ual arena, let us now try the effect of taking Fisher's dictum
'There can be no generalizations'1 au pied de la kttrc. We can perhaps
now still legitimately utter the word 'battle' in recording the battle of
Megiddo (commissum circa 1468 B.C.); but, now that we are conscien-
tiously abiding by the regulation that 'History never repeats itself, we
must, of course, find some other word to describe what happened at
Marathon, and some other again to describe what happened at Waterloo;
and, when we have shot all the bolts in our most copious dictionary of
synonyms (though, strictly speaking, we shall be guilty of 'not playing
the game' if we stoop to any such verbal subterfuge), we shall find our-
selves constrained to keep silence for ever after on the subject of the
affairs of Homo Belligerans. We can also perhaps now still legitimately
pronounce the words 'Pope John F; yet all the known synonyms of that
ilk—'pontiff'/prelate', 'primate', 'hierophant', 'Grand Lama', 'Mobadh-
an Mobadh', and what-not—will hardly legitimize for us the twenty-
two (or is it twenty-three ?) repetitions that are obstinately demanded
of us sub rosa by a History that officially declines to repeat itself. But our
plight is perhaps more serious than we have yet realized, for, if 'History
never repeats itself', one single 'John' is the only 'John' whom it is per-
missible for us to name; and, though we may dishonestly eke out this
iron ration by buying 'Jack', 'Jean', 'Euan', 'Evan', 'Ivan*, 'Johaxuat, and
'Yohanan' in a philological black market, famine will still be lying in
wait for us round the corner when we are left with no unappropriated
homonym for affixing to the next man in the queue. But what are we
saying? For Adam, no\v that we think of it, was a man, and, since 'His-
1 See the passage quoted on p, 195, above.