CHAPTER XV
STEAM AND EVOLUTION
The realisation of the power of steam, and its application to machinery, have made a greater difference in this Greatest Story than any other single event that ever happened in it before or since. It is a realisation that came just before the end of the eighteenth century, and it made a greater difference between the story of the nineteenth century and that of all the centuries before it than there ever had been between any two former periods. That is indeed a large claim to make for it, but it is none too large.
Hitherto, the force that man had made use of to do his work had been, with few exceptions, the force of his own muscles or those of his horses or oxen. He had used the winds to blow his ships along. He had used both wind and water to turn his corn-grinding mills. He had used explosive gunpowder to propel his missiles. Earlier still, he had used the resilient force of wood, for his bows, to shoot his arrows, and this was perhaps his first use of the forces of Nature which surrounded him and which he, like everything else, without knowing it, obeyed. But now, all at once, he discovered the use of another exceedingly strong force, in steam. The real wealth of the world consists more truly in man's power to control and turn to his own use the forces of Nature than in anything else. Hitherto he had possessed scarcely any of this {186} true wealth, because his force was limited by the muscular power of himself and his domestic animals. Now he had a servant whose power to do work for him was almost without limit. The steam-engine was invented.
When we speak of a steam-engine the first idea it brings to mind is a locomotive engine drawing a train or driving a ship; but it was not to this that the steam-engine was turned on its first invention, nor is it perhaps its most important use.
[Sidenote: The first steam-engine]
Its first use was as a stationary engine, and the purposes to which those stationary engines could be, and soon were, turned are far too many to tell. Already some previous inventions in hand-worked and foot-worked machines had greatly increased the manufacture of textile goods in England.
But now cotton and wool began to be made into thread by the steam-driven machines. By them, the thread was woven into sheets and pieces. They cut and finished metal and wood into the shapes needed for a thousand different articles of daily use--furniture, agricultural implements, pots and pans, and so forth. They made and combined and pieced together parts of new machines for the making of yet more and more useful things. They had the power to hammer out great sheets of metal, and the delicacy to make a thread of wire or a needle. They became more and more efficient and fine as experience led to improvements, but it would be true to say that even in the very early days of their development a machine which it took only one man to mind and keep in working order could do as much work as had been done by twenty men who were served only by their own hands and muscles. Thus, if we may regard the productive work accomplished as the true wealth of the nation, we find it already increased by twenty times as the result of this engine.
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But it is no use producing more unless there are people who want that increased produce. And that is exactly what there were just at this moment. In spite of the wars, the population had been growing in Europe, and when they ceased, in 1815, it began to grow even faster. Besides, there was growth of humanity all the world over, and especially in America. And the end of the wars allowed the produce of one country to be freely carried across sea and exchanged for the produce of another. It was especially in British ships that the produce was carried; and this carrying trade, as it is called, was a great cause of the wealth which Britain began to make in this century.
She needed that replenishment, because it was very largely by the help of her money that the allies--especially Prussia when she was in the coalition--had been able to keep their armies in the field against France. The British were very heavily taxed in and after the Napoleonic wars even as in and after what we now call the Great War.
This Industrial Era, of which the application of steam power was the principal cause, had been in progress many years before the steam-engines were used for drawing railway trains. Perhaps 1775 may be given as the date of the first practical steam-engine in Great Britain; yet it was not till 1830 that the first steam-worked railway line was opened to the public. But once this new mode of travel was introduced it quickly superseded the old mail-coach traffic and gradually drove the coaches off the road.
Besides her carrying trade across the seas, Britain had the good fortune to find iron ore close to her coal in her North Midlands. Wherever those two were found together--the coal to heat the water into steam for the driving of the machines, and the iron as the chief material of the machines themselves and of a thousand things made by them--the conditions favoured {189} manufacturing. So, in such places, both in England and elsewhere, there grew up the large and ever-increasing towns, as the people gathered to work together in the factories. For though the machines might do the work of twenty men, many more than twenty times the former total of work was performed within the space that each of these big towns occupied.
[Sidenote: Hand loom and power loom]
[Illustration: OLD HAND LOOM AND MODERN POWER LOOM. (By kind permission of Northrop Loom Co., Blackburn.)]
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[Illustration: AN OLD MAIL COACH.]
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But all this work done in the towns by the machines meant that less work was done in the villages, and the {190} country cottages. There was no longer any profitable sale for the cloth woven at home by the little machines which the women used to work with hand and foot, because the very same, or almost the same, could be made so much more cheaply by the big steam-driven machines.
And while a machine attended by one man did the work formerly done by twenty, what about the other nineteen? Obviously, at first, they fell out of work. Therefore, when the steam-engines first came in they produced great hardship, great unemployment. The men rose up against them in organised gangs of machine-breakers. Very many machines were broken up.
[Sidenote: Conditions of industry]
But everywhere authority prevailed in the long run: the machine-breakers were put down. Men had to learn, sometimes at the cost of much suffering, to adapt themselves to a changed condition which had come to stay. The point of principal importance in the change is that it enabled the earth to support a larger population than had been possible before. We may notice this as a main result of each of the successive big changes. In the first known phase of human society we find man in the hunting stage; that passes into the pastoral stage, of keeping domestic animals, which supported more human beings than the hunting stage could. After the pastoral came the agricultural, with again an increase in the numbers that the earth could support, and lastly has come this industrial stage in which many more can be fed and clothed and kept in tolerable comfort than ever before.
And yet this industrial era had to bring its own hardships, and, unhappily, its own hatreds. The class hatred, as it is called--the animosity felt by the man who works with his hands against the class that has the money and works with its brains--arose directly out of the conditions which the steam-engine produced. To-day, when that industrial era has lasted more {191} than a hundred years, it is that hatred which makes our life so very difficult for us all, both for the classes above and for the classes below. And we are compelled to realise that the hate is largely due to the hard treatment of the lower classes by the higher in those early years. It is quite different now; there is little or no animosity, as I believe, felt by the upper classes in any country towards the lower, but I do believe that the lower classes are in some part justified in thinking that their better treatment has been won by their own effort rather than freely given by those above them. In the East the same animosities have not been aroused, for the Eastern industries have not developed along the same lines and have not caused the same difficulties.
In the industrial West, and everywhere that the white man has made his settlements, the hand workers are now protected by their organisation into Trades Unions--combinations of workers formed principally in order to bargain with the employers about the wages and the hours of work and the conditions under which the work is to be done.
At the beginning of the industrial era the workers were not able to come together in this way; so the employer made his bargain with each man separately, and, as many were anxious to get work, the employer could engage them very cheaply and make them work very hard. Nor was it only the men, or only the fully grown women, that were thus made to labour long hours for low pay. Even little children, because their labour could be engaged so cheaply, were hired to work many hours a day at such jobs about the machines and factories as a child could do. Very often the conditions as to ventilation, and so on, under which the work had to be done, were such as would not be allowed by the law now; but no one then seems to have considered the hardships of the men and women and, above all, of the children. We may believe it {192} was out of thoughtlessness and lack of recognition of their sufferings, rather than sheer cruelty, on the employer's part, that all this was done; but done it was, and it has left a bitterness of feeling which still lasts.
So the wealth of the world, as measured by its productive labour and its power of supporting human life, increased vastly; and its population increased vastly therewith. At the same time it is very much to be doubted whether the happiness of the people generally increased. But gradually, by coming together into the combinations of which I have spoken, and so being able to say to the employer, "You will not get any of us to work for you unless you give us so much money for so many hours of work"--gradually, by this argument, and sometimes by carrying it into actual effect by "striking," and ceasing to work altogether, they have won better and better terms for themselves. Employers now recognise that the workman should receive such a wage as the profits of the industry in which he is engaged suffice to pay him. Perhaps some of our more recent labour trouble is due to the worker's claim to be paid a larger wage than the industry can afford, if it is to turn out its products at a cost at which any one will buy them. And if it cannot turn them out at such cost, it must, and it will, stop producing them altogether; so that thus the workman is unemployed.
Further remarkable discoveries followed. Coal gas was used for lighting, and was later superseded by electricity. Electricity was used to give motion to machinery in place of steam. The telegraph was invented and the telephone. Engines were constructed to work by means of petrol firing within themselves--by internal combustion, as it is called--whence came motor-cars and flying machines. Wireless telegraphy made its marvellous appearance. {193} Radio-activity with its terrifying possibilities has been discovered. But no one, not even all of these together, made a new start, with a new chapter in the story, at all in the same sense as did the application of the power of steam. All these others were rather in the nature of a development from that starting-point. They were further successful efforts on the part of man to "harness," as has been said--which means, to control for his own purposes--the forces of Nature.
[Sidenote: Evolution]
There was, however, one scientific discovery of about the middle of the nineteenth century, which is of very remarkable interest in man's history, because it gave quite a new direction to his thoughts about his own origin. It is that discovery which is summed up in the word "Evolution," and which is associated especially with the name of Darwin.
Its main importance consists in its revelation that, whatever we may think about the origin of man's soul, there can be no reasonable doubt that his bodily form, his bones and all his organs, have descended to him from ancestors belonging to the same common stock as the apes or monkeys. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century man had regarded himself as specially created in his present form. He had also supposed all other living things to have been similarly created as they are. From 1850 or so, onward, he had to realise that all the many and complicated forms of life, both of plants and animals, have developed--"evolved" was the word adopted for the process--from the very simplest forms, even from single tiny cells.
It required countless ages for such a process; but the discoveries of geologists and astronomers--the earth-diggers and the star-gazers--combined to show that such countless ages not only might, but must, be assigned to the process. Our universe and our earth are by many millions of years older than men had thought.
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But perhaps the chief fact of all, about this new discovery, is that it turned men's eyes forward, instead of backward. They began to look with a new hope towards the future of the race of men. Heretofore there had been an idea that the "Golden Age," when man was very good and very happy, lay somewhere in the remote past, and that present man had very much deteriorated. The new discovery showed him that he was, on the contrary, continually "evolving" into something higher, or, at the least, that, as he now is, he has evolved from something very much lower, even from the very lowest tiny atom that has any sort of life. It was an enlivening, hope-giving discovery.
But let us not ascribe to it, as some, at its first coming, almost certainly did, more than its due. It revealed to man the origin of his body; perhaps, but of less certainty, it showed him the origin of his mind. That it tells him anything of the origin of his spiritual self is really only asserted by those who virtually deny that he has any spiritual side at all in his nature. Or so, let me say to avoid dogmatic assertion, it seems to me that they deny it.
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