The gradual improvement, throughout the centuries, of those facilities for
internal communication which reached their climax in the creation of the
present system of railways has constituted a dominating factor alike in our
industrial and in our social advancement as a people.
Until transport had provided a ready means alike of collecting raw
materials and of distributing food supplies and manufactured articles,
industries of the type familiar to us to-day were practically impossible;
and until convenient and economical means of travel were afforded, England
had to be considered less as a nation than as a collection of more or less
isolated communities, with all the disadvantages, social and moral as well
as economic, necessarily resulting; while the social and moral progress
facilitated by improved means of communication reacted, in turn, on the
industries by creating new wants for manufacturers and workers to supply.
To the right understanding of the position occupied by our National
Industries, it is thus necessary that the special significance of internal
communication and its development should, at the outset, be clearly
realised from the point of view, not alone of present-day circumstances,
but, also, of conditions that either preceded the industries themselves--so
far checking their growth that industrial development in Great Britain came
at a much later date than in many {2}countries on the Continent of
Europe--or else aided materially in the expansion of industries as the
disadvantages and drawbacks began to disappear.
That industries existed when internal communication was still in a
primitive stage in this country is true enough; but they were "domestic"
rather than "national," and it was not until the advent of better means of
transport that it became possible for them to begin to pass from the one
stage to the other, and, at the same time, to exercise so important an
influence on our advancement as a nation. It is no less true that British
commerce, conducted by ships obtaining ready access to foreign ports by
traversing ocean highways, had made much greater progress at an early
period in our history than industries dependent on inland highways that
were then either non-existent or scarcely passable; yet, though navigation
might advance still further, and though navigators might discover still
more new countries, commerce could not hope to attain to the expansion it
subsequently underwent until the industries whose operations were to be
facilitated by improvement in land communication supplied the merchants
with the home commodities which they required for sale or exchange in the
markets of the world. Whatever, again, the natural resources of a
country--and such resources have certainly been great in our own--they may
be of little material value until they can be readily moved from the place
where they exist to the place where they can be used; and even then it is
necessary that the cost of transport shall not be unduly high.
Transport and communication by land and water have thus become what Prof.
J. Shield Nicholson rightly calls, in his "Principles of Political
Economy," "the bases of industrial organisation"; and it is to industrial
organisation that a country such as ours has been indebted in a pre-eminent
degree both for its material prosperity and for the position it occupies
to-day among the nations of the world. But just as British engineers long
regarded the subject of road construction and road repairs as beneath their
notice, and left such work to be done by any parish "surveyor," subsidised
pauper or "Blind Jack of Knaresboro'," who thought fit to engage in it, so
have most writers of history, while zealously recording the actions of
kings, of diplomatists, of politicians, and of warriors who may have made a
great stir in their day but who took only a very {3}small share in the real
and permanent progress of the British people, bestowed only a passing
reference--and sometimes not even that--on questions of trade and transport
which have played a far more important part in our social and national
advancement.
The history of railways has already been told by various writers. But the
history of railways is only the last chapter in the history of inland
transport and communication; and, though that last chapter is of paramount
importance, and will here receive full recognition, it is essential that
those who would form a clear idea of the position as a whole should begin
the story at the beginning, and trace the course of events leading up to
the conditions as they exist to-day.
{4}CHAPTER II