Part 2
Who was this maniac? It was Solomon de Caus, he had a vision whilst dabbling with steam vessels, and he had seen carriages and ships propelled by steam. This was too much for men dressed in half hose and doublets, or whatever was the tuxedo of their day. “Carriages driven by steam ... lock him up!” So he was locked up. But the idea lived on, and it grew. There was Giovanni Branca, Edward Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, then Thomas Savery, who, in 1698, obtained a patent for a water raising engine. There were others, Jean de Hautefeuille, who, in 1678, suggested the piston; Denis Papin, 1690, of cylinder and piston fame. At length Thomas Newcomen, 1705, something near success; others still, Humphrey Potter, Henry Beighton, but all waiting for _the_ man. Then _the_ man came in the form of a poor instrument maker, and the new Jerusalem of the steam age was Glasgow, for there did he work. This man was James Watt, who, having realized that the cylinder of an engine should always be as hot as the steam which entered it, in 1769 threw open the doors of the most stupendous epoch in economic history. The transmutation of heat into mechanical work had been discovered, it was the true stone of the philosophers, the “Open Sesame” to another age.
GEORGE STEPHENSON, ENGINE-WRIGHT
In the very year James Watt built the first practical steam engine, namely, the year 1769—the year Napoleon was born—fearful riots were taking place in Russia, because some enlightened person had introduced the potato, a useful vegetable as we all know, yet at this time one in which the Russian peasant saw the Satanic thumb, for he was certain that this humble vegetable was the “devil’s apple.” Though why this should have detracted from its nutritive qualities I cannot say.
Looking back now, and we are nearing Brusselton, it seems to me that there is no difference between the spirit of these deluded peasants and those who, with shoe lasts, beat vigorously on the door of Erichthonius’s house. They are one and all Sir Henry Herberts, though the particular cut of their clothes may differ. George Stephenson, having studied steam engines in general and Mr. Trevithick’s crude and inefficient locomotive in particular, determined to build one of his own, and, with the support of Lord Ravensworth, he accomplished this feat at Killingworth in 1814. There the first efficient locomotive was made. Had Lord Eldon been a Russian, he would probably have objected to potatoes, but being an Englishman he preferred bigger game. “I am sorry,” he said, “to find the intelligent people of the North-country gone mad on the subject of railways.” A few miles had only been opened, but this was quite sufficient to establish madness, and by some other of his ilk, the adage, “A fool and his money are soon parted,” was applied to Lord Ravensworth.
The Killingworth railway was followed by the Stockton and Darlington line. Mr. Edward Pease, the Quaker supporter of Stephenson, had said: “Let the country but make the railroads, and the railroads will make the country.” Be it remembered that locomotives had been working at Killingworth, and very efficiently, for ten years; but there were others who, unlike Mr. Pease, were full of the spirit of old Herbert. The Duke of Cleveland opposed the measure in Parliament, as the line would pass through his fox covers, and, due to his influence it was thrown out. A new survey was made, avoiding these precious earths, and the railway was built.
The next line was that between Manchester and Liverpool. Lord Derby turned out his farm hands to chase Stephenson’s surveyors off his estates. Lord Sefton did likewise, and the Duke of Bridgewater threatened to shoot them at sight. Stephenson had his theodolite so often smashed that he deemed it wise to hire a prize fighter to carry it. The “Quarterly Review” supported the project, and it is curious to read what it said, for it will give the reader some idea of the virulence of the opposition. It says:
“What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling _twice as fast_ as stage coaches! We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve’s ricochet rockets, as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine going at such a rate.... We trust that Parliament will, in all railways it may sanction, limit the speed to _eight or nine miles an hour_, which we entirely agree with Mr. Sylvester is as great as can be ventured on with safety.”
This was praise indeed, and it is amazing that the British Parliament, which is always full of ordinary men, did not take the hint and limit the speed of the locomotive to that of a trotting horse. Nevertheless, though this grand opportunity was missed, the Parliamentary Committee did all in its power to obstruct the measure. One of its members asked George Stephenson: “Suppose a cow were to stray upon the line?” There was a hush of horror, then he added: “Would not that, think you, be a very awkward circumstance?” “Yes,” answered Stephenson, “very awkward indeed—_for the coo_!”
The leading councils openly declared that this “untaught and inarticulate genius” was mad.... “Every part of the scheme shows that this man has applied himself to a subject of which he has no knowledge, and to which he has no science to apply.” Not only would these locomotive engines be a terrible nuisance, “in consequence of the fire and smoke vomited forth by them,” but “the value of land in the neighbourhood of Manchester alone would be deteriorated by no less than £20,000!” “The most absurd scheme that ever entered into the head of man to conceive,” shouted Mr. Alderson, the leading counsel. “No engineer in his senses would go through Chat Moss,” solemnly declared Mr. Giles, the most eminent engineer brought forward by the opposition. He estimated the cost of such a project at £270,000. Stephenson did it for £28,000, but the line was an expensive one as it had so many fox covers to avoid.
All this was but a preliminary skirmish, the main battle now began. The beef-eating Briton was thoroughly aroused. George Stephenson was considered to be an incarnation or certainly an implement of his Satanic Majesty. The public were appealed to, and ever ready to hinder progress, they took off their tuxedo, smocks, frocks, morning coats or whatever covered their bodies, and formed phalanx against the common foe. A meeting of Manchester ministers of all denominations was convened. This meeting declared that the locomotive was “in direct opposition both to the law of God and to the most enduring interests of society.” This set match to powder. The doctors declared that the air would be poisoned and birds would die of suffocation. The landowners, that the preservation of pheasants and foxes was no longer possible. Householders, that their houses would be burnt down and the air polluted by clouds of smoke. Horse-breeders, that horses would become extinct. Farmers, that oats and hay would be rendered unsaleable. Innkeepers, that inns would be ruined. Passengers, that boilers would burst. Heaven knows who—“that the locomotive would prevent cows grazing, hens laying, and would cause ladies to give premature birth to children at the sight of these things moving at four and a half miles an hour!”
Yet there was this consolation. The very, very ordinary man, the British public at large, declared that “the weight of the locomotive (six tons!) would completely prevent its moving, and that railways, even if made, could _never_ be worked by steam power.” Yet for ten years now, and more, the Killingworth engines were running daily!
The Stockton and Darlington line was a tremendous success; so also was the railway between Manchester and Liverpool, yet opposition thickened rather than lessened. In 1830, the “Rocket” had attained a speed of thirty-five miles an hour, yet, in 1832, Colonel Sibthorpe (the Army now come into the picture and oh! how bravely), declared his hatred of these “infernal railroads,” and that he “would rather meet a highwayman, or see a burglar on his premises, than an engineer!” When the Birmingham railway bill was before Parliament, Sir Astley Cooper, that most eminent of surgeons, declared: “You are entering upon an enormous undertaking of which you know nothing. Then look at the recklessness of your proceedings! You are proposing to destroy property, cutting up our estates in all directions! Why, gentlemen, if this sort of thing be permitted to go on, you will in a very few years _destroy the noblesse_!” And this, from a man who had been knighted for cutting a wen out of George IV.’s neck!
THE NATURE OF THE BEAST
All this is not only amusing, but vastly instructive—these beaters of shoe lasts on the lintel of genius. Here we have a deep and vivid study presented to us of popular ignorance, that universal coagulant of truth. In 1824, George Stephenson had said to his son and a companion: “Now lads, I will tell you that I think you will live to see the day when railways will come to supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in this country—when mail coaches will go by railway, and railroads will become the Great Highway for the King and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a working man to travel on a railway than to walk on foot.”
The victory was won in 1825, the year following this memorable prophecy; yet, in 1835, the reactionaries were still fighting a rear guard action, and we find the landed gentry sending forward their servants and luggage by rail and condemning themselves to jog along the roads in the family coach. On the Continent it was just the same, and even in 1862 the Papal Government opposed the opening of the Rome and Naples railway. The rear guard fought on until June, 1842, when, on a certain Monday, Her Majesty Queen Victoria made her first railway trip. It was from Windsor to London, and her coach had a crown on its roof. The reactionaries went head over heels, donned their frock coats or whatever garment appertained to their social rank, and declared the railway the greatest blessing God had ever permitted man to discover. The Marquis of Bristol, wildly excited, said that “if necessary, they might _make a tunnel beneath his very drawing-room_,” and the Rev. F. Litchfield that he did not mind if a railway ran through his bedroom, “with the bedposts for a station.” Ever irrational and unbalanced, very ordinary men went as mad on railways as they had been mad against them. The panic of 1844–1846 was the result. In the last-mentioned year applications were made to Parliament for powers to raise £389,000,000 for the construction of new lines.
On the 26th of June, 1847, a year before George Stephenson died, he attended the opening of the Trent Valley Railway. Sir Robert Peel was his host and proclaimed him “the chief of our practical philosophers.” Seven baronets and two or three dozen members of Parliament, all in frock coats and tall hats, did homage to the great engineer, whilst the clergy blessed the enterprise and bid all hail to the new line as “enabling them to carry on with greater facility those operations in connection with religion which were calculated to be so beneficial to the country.”
I wonder what passed in George Stephenson’s mind. In 1825 he was universally proclaimed mad and a danger to society; in 1847 he is proclaimed “the chief of our practical philosophers” and the saviour of society. I wonder which he objected to most—their abuse or their praise? Both, I should imagine, were largely overlooked by him, for he was a very great man, and surely those who abused him and praised him—very, very small—truly insignificant.
PROTEAN IGNORANCE
Protean ignorance never dies; this is the problem which confronts us. George Stephenson has only been my peg upon which I have hung this musty old skin, indeed no golden fleece, but just as magical, so that I might the better examine it; and a fine stout peg it is—all of British oak.
Stephenson was the father of the locomotive; as to this there can be no dispute, and equally can there be no doubt that the locomotive has changed the superstructure of the civilized world, yet its foundations remain permanently fixed. Matter fluctuates as the will of man unmasks the material world; but the soul of man remains fixed, abiding in the solitude of his ignorance.
Ignorance and stupidity are always with us, they are the Dioscuri of the temple of life. To change the material world is like changing our clothes, to change the spiritual world is like changing our intestines. Spiritual, I admit, is not the exact word, neither is moral nor human. To me, the spiritual is all-pervading and uninfluenced by intelligence or reason. A man who is grossly ignorant is grossly religious, for he is a worshipper of idols.
To-day we see the multitudes bending the knee to Baal, and yet we see them surrounded by misery, woe and suffering. No disease is incurable, no ill cannot be conquered. But every would-be saviour, however humble, must prepare for crucifixion, because the very multitudes they would save are in themselves their worst enemies.
Henry Herbert never dies, he was here before Adam took form from out the dust of Eden, and he will be the last man to leave this earth when the last trumpet sounds, and I have not the slightest doubt that he will then question the wisdom of the Almighty. He will question the wisdom of all things new, and yet, to-day, the world is groaning for novelty, for material growth means also material decay. Though very ordinary men can build middens, it is only the extraordinary man who can shift these piles of refuse—accumulations of old traditions, customs and accepted things. To me the moral of this centenary is not the power of steam, but the power of the will of man. George Stephenson triumphed over all difficulties, because he was possessed of a will to win. The stronger opposition grew the more mighty grew his will. Protean ignorance has, therefore, its virtue; it renders progress difficult to attain; it is the whetstone of genius. When we realize this, in place of wringing our hands in lamentation when Henry Herbert beats his last against our door, we open it and look at him, and laugh, and then close it and go on with our work—in one word, we persevere. Laughter and Perseverance, surely these two are the shield and sword of progress.
THE CONQUEST OF THE ELYSIAN FIELDS
THE EQUATION OF POWER AND MOVEMENT
Power and Movement, these are the foundations of civilization and the sire and dam of progress, and before the days of Watt, Fulton and Stephenson, all Anglo-Saxons, how shallow were they laid; so shallow that their social and industrial superstruction is, to-day, difficult to visualize, let alone to understand. Here is a little glimpse, and if not a very dramatic one, yet one which is apt to make us wonder at this lost world of little more than a century ago, a world all but obscured in clouds of steam.
In 1770, Adam Smith wrote (and be it remembered that for fifty years after this date the picture remains true) the following:—
“A broad-wheeled wagon attended by two men, and drawn by eight horses, in about six weeks’ time carries and brings back between London and Edinburgh near four ton weight of goods. Upon two hundred tons of goods, therefore, carried by the cheapest land-carriage from London to Edinburgh, there must be charged the maintenance of a hundred men for three weeks, and both the maintenance, and, what is nearly equal to the maintenance, the wear and tear of four hundred horses, as well as of fifty great wagons.”
To-day, when the trans-Siberian railway is in working order, a man can travel in the same time, with four tons of baggage if he wishes, from London to Tokio and back. Edinburgh is four hundred miles from London, and Tokio is some eight thousand miles from this same city; such has been the expansion of movement and the contraction of space, and to-morrow aircraft may reduce the time taken to a fortnight.
The fire of Prometheus is as a rush-light compared to the volcano of steam which, like all great world forces, is a mixture of Pandora and her box; for it has given us beauty and wealth, and also ugliness and starvation. It revived the world, bled white during the Napoleonic wars, and, in place of conquering the world as the great Corsican attempted, it recreated it.
When men began to move by steam power, Titans strode this earth. In peace time we see science advancing as it had never advanced before, industry growing beyond belief or imagination. Cities spring up in the night, such as Chicago, for whilst, in 1830, its population numbered a hundred souls, to-day it holds nearly three millions. Nations grew and doubled, trebled and quadrupled their populations, and the wealth of Crœsus is to-day but the bank balance of Henry Ford. Yet out of all this prosperity, created by steam power, arose the Great War of 1914–1918, which, in its four years of frenzy, was to show a surfeited civilisation the destructive power of steam.
What do we see during this last period of roaring turmoil? A curious picture. The railway and the steamship, which, during days of peace, increased movement out of all belief, during war end by impeding it. Like great funnels, we see the railways, pouring forth cataracts of men, veritable human inundations, and then we see that, though it is easy to move masses by rail, once the rail is left behind, it is next to impossible to supply these masses by road, or to move them in face of gun and machine gun. The war becomes a war of trenches, not a moving war, but a stationary affair—men look at each other and sometimes shoot.
As peace begets war, power and movement are the foundation of the second, just as they are of the first. On the battlefield or in the workshop, power is useless without movement. It is no good setting up a boot factory, unless you can get the boots on to the feet of the people, and in war it is no good piling up bayonets, unless you can get them into the intestines of your enemy. Thus, it happened that, before the war was three months old, though each side possessed much power, power in itself was useless, for it could not be moved. The remaining four years of the war were spent in solving the equation of power and movement.
This problem was partially solved by the tank, which possessed both power and movement. And from the armies which used these machines, and there were never very many of them, little streamlets of men trickled forward out of these great stagnant human pools, and the war was won.
THE RIDDLE OF THE GORDIAN KNOT
What is our problem to-day? It is again the problem of power and movement; not a new problem, but a very old problem, in fact the eternal problem dressed up in a new frock. Our problem is to revive our old industries, so far as they can be revived, and to establish new ones, for industries, like the human beings who create them, grow old, come on the pension list and die. Our problem is, as it was during the war, to shift the population, to demobilize our great army of unemployed, and to cause it to trickle from our over-populated little island into our underpopulated Dominions and Colonies. Lastly, our problem is to secure ourselves against another war.
To-day, we find ourselves in a veritable labyrinth of difficulties, but there must be a way out, possibly several, for otherwise we could not be standing in its centre. We have got into it, so we can get out of it, as we have of many a former maze; but how?
It is here that I think the spirit of George Stephenson can help us, and it is for this reason that I have taken up so much of this little book with this great man’s name and work, and with the difficulties he faced and, undaunted, conquered. His motto was “Perseverance”; let it be ours. He did not talk over much, but he took his coat off and got to work. He worked single-handed and was obstructed at every turn. The whole country was against him, yet he conquered, and, more to him than to any other man a century ago, it seems to me, were the problems, which then faced England, solved, and they are the problems which face England now.
As it may be said, and with some truth, in fact a great deal of truth, that the railway made the war, since it made the peace which preceded the war, so with equal truth may it be said that the petrol engine, encased in a tank, by making peace possible, may now make peace profitable, even if in doing so it begets the germs of another war. In other words, as the war was so largely won by the tank, so must the peace which has followed it be largely won by the caterpillar tractor, or roadless vehicle.
Henry Herbert will vote me to Bedlam, but this is the most encouraging fact of all, for every new idea must start by being in a minority of one, such as that of George Stephenson’s against the world. The stronger the opposition the better the idea, may not be a law of Nature, yet it is a pretty sound rule, and one with few exceptions. If we persevere and laugh, the caterpillar tractor will win the peace, and to paraphrase the words of George Stephenson, I will, in my turn, make a prophecy:
“Now lads, I venture to tell you that I think you will live to see the day when tracked vehicles will supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in roadless countries; when armies will be moved across country and roadless traction will become the chief means of commercial movement in all undeveloped lands. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a farmer or soldier to use a tracked machine than to travel by rail.”
As it took Mahomet three years to collect thirteen followers, I shall not be downcast if I collect no greater a number out of the readers of this book, because perseverance was the motto of Mahomet as well as of Stephenson, and as perseverance won them their battles, may it win me mine.
Many will consider my prophecy ridiculous, and a multitude of Henry Herberts will foam at the mouth. Protean ignorance is against me—a resilient Everest of oiled rubber. A hundred years ago it was boisterously hostile to novelty, to-day it is somnolently apathetic, and, in this latter mood, it is almost more overpowering than in the former. Nevertheless, let us smile, let us take off our coats and climb this glutinous mountain, for the Elysian fields lie beyond.
A few years ago we were told that, once the war was won, this little island of ours was going to be fit for heroes to live in, as if any country ever had been or could be an Eldorado after a great war! To-day, we have well over a million unemployed men and women in this country, and I have no doubt there are many heroes and heroines amongst them; certainly the conditions demand an heroic race to win through.