EARLY TRAVELLING ON THE LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER RAILWAY, 1833
Here was a sudden change in what had long been a fixed condition of
human life, the maximum rate of land transport. After the Russian
disaster, Napoleon travelled from near Vilna to Paris in 312 hours.
This was a journey of about 1,400 miles. He was travelling with every
conceivable advantage, and he averaged under 5 miles an hour. An
ordinary traveller could not have done this distance in twice the time.
These were about the same maximum rates of travel as held good between
Rome and Gaul in the first century A.D. Then suddenly came this
tremendous change. The railways reduced this journey for any ordinary
traveller to less than forty-eight hours. That is to say, they reduced
the chief European distances to about a tenth of what they had been.
They made it possible to carry out administrative work in areas ten
times as great as any that had hitherto been workable under one
administration. The full significance of that possibility in Europe
still remains to be realized. Europe is still netted in boundaries
drawn in the horse and road era. In America the effects were
immediate. To the United States of America, sprawling westward, it
meant the possibility of a continuous access to Washington, however far
the frontier travelled across the continent. It meant unity, sustained
on a scale that would otherwise have been impossible.
THE STEAMBOAT: CLERMONT, 1807, U.S.A.
THE STEAMBOAT: _CLERMONT_, 1807, U.S.A.
The steamboat was, if anything, a little ahead of the steam engine in
its earlier phases. There was a steamboat, the _Charlotte Dundas_, on
the Firth of Clyde Canal in 1802, and in 1807 an American named Fulton
had a steamer, the Clermont, with British-built engines, upon the
Hudson River above New York. The first steamship to put to sea was
also an American, the Phœnix, which went from New York (Hoboken) to
Philadelphia. So, too, was the first ship using steam (she also had
sails) to cross the Atlantic, the Savannah (1819). All these were
paddle-wheel boats and paddle-wheel boats are not adapted to work in
heavy seas. The paddles smash too easily, and the boat is then
disabled. The screw steamship followed rather slowly. Many
difficulties had to be surmounted before the screw was a practicable
thing. Not until the middle of the century did the tonnage of
steamships upon the sea begin to overhaul that of sailing ships. After
that the evolution in sea transport was rapid. For the first time men
began to cross the seas and oceans with some certainty as to the date
of their arrival. The transatlantic crossing, which had been an
uncertain adventure of several weeks—which might stretch to months—was
accelerated, until in 1910 it was brought down, in the case of the
fastest boats, to under five days, with a practically notifiable hour
of arrival.
Concurrently with the development of steam transport upon land and sea
a new and striking addition to the facilities of human intercourse
arose out of the investigations of Volta, Galvani and Faraday into
various electrical phenomena. The electric telegraph came into
existence in 1835. The first underseas cable was laid in 1851 between
France and England. In a few years the telegraph system had spread over
the civilized world, and news which had hitherto travelled slowly from
point to point became practically simultaneous throughout the earth.
These things, the steam railway and the electric telegraph, were to the
popular imagination of the middle nineteenth century the most striking
and revolutionary of inventions, but they were only the most
conspicuous and clumsy first fruits of a far more extensive process.
Technical knowledge and skill were developing with an extraordinary
rapidity, and to an extraordinary extent measured by the progress of
any previous age. Far less conspicuous at first in everyday life, but
finally far more important, was the extension of man’s power over
various structural materials. Before the middle of the eighteenth
century iron was reduced from its ores by means of wood charcoal, was
handled in small pieces, and hammered and wrought into shape. It was
material for a craftsman. Quality and treatment were enormously
dependent upon the experience and sagacity of the individual
iron-worker. The largest masses of iron that could be dealt with under
those conditions amounted at most (in the sixteenth century) to two or
three tons. (There was a very definite upward limit, therefore, to the
size of cannon.) The blast-furnace rose in the eighteenth century and
developed with the use of coke. Not before the eighteenth century do
we find rolled sheet iron (1728) and rolled rods and bars (1783).
Nasmyth’s steam hammer came as late as 1838.
The ancient world, because of its metallurgical inferiority, could not
use steam. The steam engine, even the primitive pumping engine, could
not develop before sheet iron was available. The early engines seem to
the modern eye very pitiful and clumsy bits of ironmongery, but they
were the utmost that the metallurgical science of the time could do. As
late as 1856 came the Bessemer process, and presently (1864) the
open-hearth process, in which steel and every sort of iron could be
melted, purified and cast in a manner and upon a scale hitherto unheard
of. To-day in the electric furnace one may see tons of incandescent
steel swirling about like boiling milk in a saucepan. Nothing in the
previous practical advances of mankind is comparable in its
consequences to the complete mastery over enormous masses of steel and
iron and over their texture and quality which man has now achieved.
The railways and early engines of all sorts were the mere first
triumphs of the new metallurgical methods. Presently came ships of
iron and steel, vast bridges, and a new way of building with steel upon
a gigantic scale. Men realized too late that they had planned their
railways with far too timid a gauge, that they could have organized
their travelling with far more steadiness and comfort upon a much
bigger scale.
Before the nineteenth century there were no ships in the world much
over 2,000 tons burthen; now there is nothing wonderful about a
50,000-ton liner. There are people who sneer at this kind of progress
as being a progress in “mere size,” but that sort of sneering merely
marks the intellectual limitations of those who indulge in it. The
great ship or the steel-frame building is not, as they imagine, a
magnified version of the small ship or building of the past; it is a
thing different in kind, more lightly and strongly built, of finer and
stronger materials; instead of being a thing of precedent and
rule-of-thumb, it is a thing of subtle and intricate calculation. In
the old house or ship, matter was dominant—the material and its needs
had to be slavishly obeyed; in the new, matter had been captured,
changed, coerced. Think of the coal and iron and sand dragged out of
the banks and pits, wrenched, wrought, molten and cast, to be flung at
last, a slender glittering pinnacle of steel and glass, six hundred
feet above the crowded city!
We have given these particulars of the advance in man’s knowledge of
the metallurgy of steel and its results by way of illustration. A
parallel story could be told of the metallurgy of copper and tin, and
of a multitude of metals, nickel and aluminium to name but two, unknown
before the nineteenth century dawned. It is in this great and growing
mastery over substances, over different sorts of glass, over rocks and
plasters and the like, over colours and textures, that the main
triumphs of the mechanical revolution have thus far been achieved. Yet
we are still in the stage of the first fruits in the matter. We have
the power, but we have still to learn how to use our power. Many of
the first employments of these gifts of science have been vulgar,
tawdry, stupid or horrible. The artist and the adaptor have still
hardly begun to work with the endless variety of substances now at
their disposal.
Parallel with this extension of mechanical possibilities the new
science of electricity grew up. It was only in the eighties of the
nineteenth century that this body of enquiry began to yield results to
impress the vulgar mind. Then suddenly came electric light and
electric traction, and the transmutation of forces, the possibility of
sending power, that could be changed into mechanical motion or light or
heat as one chose, along a copper wire, as water is sent along a pipe,
began to come through to the ideas of ordinary people....
The British and French were at first the leading peoples in this great
proliferation of knowledge; but presently the Germans, who had learnt
humility under Napoleon, showed such zeal and pertinacity in scientific
enquiry as to overhaul these leaders. British science was largely the
creation of Englishmen and Scotchmen working outside the ordinary
centres of erudition.
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SPINNING WHEEL
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SPINNING WHEEL
_In the Ipswich Museum_
MODEL OF ARKWRIGHT’S SPINNING JENNY, 1769
MODEL OF ARKWRIGHT’S SPINNING JENNY, 1769
_From the specifications in the Patent Office_
The universities of Britain were at this time in a state of educational
retrogression, largely given over to a pedantic conning of the Latin
and Greek classics. French education, too, was dominated by the
classical tradition of the Jesuit schools, and consequently it was not
difficult for the Germans to organize a body of investigators, small
indeed in relation to the possibilities of the case, but large in
proportion to the little band of British and French inventors and
experimentalists. And though this work of research and experiment was
making Britain and France the most rich and powerful countries in the
world, it was not making scientific and inventive men rich and
powerful. There is a necessary unworldliness about a sincere
scientific man; he is too preoccupied with his research to plan and
scheme how to make money out of it. The economic exploitation of his
discoveries falls very easily and naturally, therefore, into the hands
of a more acquisitive type; and so we find that the crops of rich men
which every fresh phase of scientific and technical progress has
produced in Great Britain, though they have not displayed quite the
same passionate desire to insult and kill the goose that laid the
national golden eggs as the scholastic and clerical professions, have
been quite content to let that profitable creature starve. Inventors
and discoverers came by nature, they thought, for cleverer people to
profit by.
In this matter the Germans were a little wiser. The German “learned”
did not display the same vehement hatred of the new learning. They
permitted its development. The German business man and manufacturer
again had not quite the same contempt for the man of science as had his
British competitor. Knowledge, these Germans believed, might be a
cultivated crop, responsive to fertilizers. They did concede,
therefore, a certain amount of opportunity to the scientific mind;
their public expenditure on scientific work was relatively greater, and
this expenditure was abundantly rewarded. By the latter half of the
nineteenth century the German scientific worker had made German a
necessary language for every science student who wished to keep abreast
with the latest work in his department, and in certain branches, and
particularly in chemistry, Germany acquired a very great superiority
over her western neighbours. The scientific effort of the sixties and
seventies in Germany began to tell after the eighties, and the German
gained steadily upon Britain and France in technical and industrial
prosperity.
A fresh phase in the history of invention opened when in the eighties a
new type of engine came into use, an engine in which the expansive
force of an explosive mixture replaced the expansive force of steam.
The light, highly efficient engines that were thus made possible were
applied to the automobile, and developed at last to reach such a pitch
of lightness and efficiency as to render flight—long known to be
possible—a practical achievement. A successful flying machine—but not
a machine large enough to take up a human body—was made by Professor
Langley of the Smithsonian Institute of Washington as early as 1897.
By 1909 the aeroplane was available for human locomotion. There had
seemed to be a pause in the increase of human speed with the perfection
of railways and automobile road traction, but with the flying machine
came fresh reductions in the effective distance between one point of
the earth’s surface and another. In the eighteenth century the
distance from London to Edinburgh was an eight days’ journey; in 1918
the British Civil Air Transport Commission reported that the journey
from London to Melbourne, halfway round the earth, would probably in a
few years’ time be accomplished in that same period of eight days.
AN EARLY WEAVING MACHINE
AN EARLY WEAVING MACHINE
_From an engraving by W. Hincks in the British Museum_
Too much stress must not be laid upon these striking reductions in the
time distances of one place from another. They are merely one aspect of
a much profounder and more momentous enlargement of human possibility.
The science of agriculture and agricultural chemistry, for instance,
made quite parallel advances during the nineteenth century. Men learnt
so to fertilize the soil as to produce quadruple and quintuple the
crops got from the same area in the seventeenth century. There was a
still more extraordinary advance in medical science; the average
duration of life rose, the daily efficiency increased, the waste of
life through ill-health diminished.
Now here altogether we have such a change in human life as to
constitute a fresh phase of history. In a little more than a century
this mechanical revolution has been brought about. In that time man
made a stride in the material conditions of his life vaster than he had
done during the whole long interval between the palæolithic stage and
the age of cultivation, or between the days of Pepi in Egypt and those
of George III. A new gigantic material framework for human affairs has
come into existence. Clearly it demands great readjustments of our
social, economical and political methods. But these readjustments have
necessarily waited upon the development of the mechanical revolution,
and they are still only in their opening stage to-day.
LVIII
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
There is a tendency in many histories to confuse together what we have
here called the mechanical revolution, which was an entirely new thing
in human experience arising out of the development of organized
science, a new step like the invention of agriculture or the discovery
of metals, with something else, quite different in its origins,
something for which there was already an historical precedent, the
social and financial development which is called the _industrial
revolution_. The two processes were going on together, they were
constantly reacting upon each other, but they were in root and essence
different. There would have been an industrial revolution of sorts if
there had been no coal, no steam, no machinery; but in that case it
would probably have followed far more closely upon the lines of the
social and financial developments of the later years of the Roman
Republic. It would have repeated the story of dispossessed free
cultivators, gang labour, great estates, great financial fortunes, and
a socially destructive financial process. Even the factory method came
before power and machinery. Factories were the product not of
machinery, but of the “division of labour.” Drilled and sweated workers
were making such things as millinery cardboard boxes and furniture, and
colouring maps and book illustrations and so forth, before even
water-wheels had been used for industrial purposes. There were
factories in Rome in the days of Augustus. New books, for instance,
were dictated to rows of copyists in the factories of the book-sellers.
The attentive student of Defoe and of the political pamphlets of
Fielding will realize that the idea of herding poor people into
establishments to work collectively for their living was already
current in Britain before the close of the seventeenth century. There
are intimations of it even as early as More’s _Utopia_ (1516). It was a
social and not a mechanical development.
Up to past the middle of the eighteenth century the social and economic
history of western Europe was in fact retreading the path along which
the Roman state had gone in the last three centuries B.C. But the
political disunions of Europe, the political convulsions against
monarchy, the recalcitrance of the common folk and perhaps also the
greater accessibility of the western European intelligence to
mechanical ideas and inventions, turned the process into quite novel
directions. Ideas of human solidarity, thanks to Christianity, were
far more widely diffused in the newer European world, political power
was not so concentrated, and the man of energy anxious to get rich
turned his mind, therefore, very willingly from the ideas of the slave
and of gang labour to the idea of mechanical power and the machine.
The mechanical revolution, the process of mechanical invention and
discovery, was a new thing in human experience and it went on
regardless of the social, political, economic and industrial
consequences it might produce. The industrial revolution, on the other
hand, like most other human affairs, was and is more and more
profoundly changed and deflected by the constant variation in human
conditions caused by the mechanical revolution. And the essential
difference between the amassing of riches, the extinction of small
farmers and small business men, and the phase of big finance in the
latter centuries of the Roman Republic on the one hand, and the very
similar concentration of capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries on the other, lies in the profound difference in the
character of labour that the mechanical revolution was bringing about.
The power of the old world was human power; everything depended
ultimately upon the driving power of human muscle, the muscle of
ignorant and subjugated men. A little animal muscle, supplied by draft
oxen, horse traction and the like, contributed. Where a weight had to
be lifted, men lifted it; where a rock had to be quarried, men chipped
it out; where a field had to be ploughed, men and oxen ploughed it; the
Roman equivalent of the steamship was the galley with its bank of
sweating rowers. A vast proportion of mankind in the early
civilizations were employed in purely mechanical drudgery. At its
onset, power-driven machinery did not seem to promise any release from
such unintelligent toil. Great gangs of men were employed in
excavating canals, in making railway cuttings and embankments, and the
like. The number of miners increased enormously. But the extension of
facilities and the output of commodities increased much more. And as
the nineteenth century went on, the plain logic of the new situation
asserted itself more clearly. Human beings were no longer wanted as a
source of mere indiscriminated power. What could be done mechanically
by a human being could be done faster and better by a machine. The
human being was needed now only where choice and intelligence had to be
exercised. Human beings were wanted only as human beings. The drudge,
on whom all the previous civilizations had rested, the creature of mere
obedience, the man whose brains were superfluous, had become
unnecessary to the welfare of mankind.
INCIDENT IN THE DAYS OF THE SLAVE TRADE
INCIDENT IN THE DAYS OF THE SLAVE TRADE
_From a print after Morland in the British Museum_
This was as true of such ancient industries as agriculture and mining
as it was of the newest metallurgical processes. For ploughing, sowing
and harvesting, swift machines came forward to do the work of scores of
men. The Roman civilization was built upon cheap and degraded human
beings; modern civilization is being rebuilt upon cheap mechanical
power. For a hundred years power has been getting cheaper and labour
dearer. If for a generation or so machinery has had to wait its turn
in the mine, it is simply because for a time men were cheaper than
machinery.
EARLY FACTORY, IN COLEBROOKDALE
EARLY FACTORY, IN COLEBROOKDALE
_From a print the British Museum_
Now here was a change-over of quite primary importance in human
affairs. The chief solicitude of the rich and of the ruler in the old
civilization had been to keep up a supply of drudges. As the
nineteenth century went on, it became more and more plain to the
intelligent directive people that the common man had now to be
something better than a drudge. He had to be educated—if only to
secure “industrial efficiency.” He had to understand what he was
about. From the days of the first Christian propaganda, popular
education had been smouldering in Europe, just as it had smouldered in
Asia wherever Islam has set its foot, because of the necessity of
making the believer understand a little of the belief by which he is
saved, and of enabling him to read a little in the sacred books by
which his belief is conveyed. Christian controversies, with their
competition for adherents, ploughed the ground for the harvest of
popular education. In England, for instance, by the thirties and
forties of the nineteenth century, the disputes of the sects and the
necessity of catching adherents young had produced a series of
competing educational organizations for children, the church “National”
schools, the dissenting “British” schools, and even Roman Catholic
elementary schools. The second half of the nineteenth century was a
period of rapid advance in popular education throughout all the
Westernized world. There was no parallel advance in the education of
the upper classes—some advance, no doubt, but nothing to correspond—and
so the great gulf that had divided that world hitherto into the readers
and the non-reading mass became little more than a slightly perceptible
difference in educational level. At the back of this process was the
mechanical revolution, apparently regardless of social conditions, but
really insisting inexorably upon the complete abolition of a totally
illiterate class throughout the world.
The economic revolution of the Roman Republic had never been clearly
apprehended by the common people of Rome. The ordinary Roman citizen
never saw the changes through which he lived, clearly and
comprehensively as we see them. But the industrial revolution, as it
went on towards the end of the nineteenth century, was more and more
distinctly _seen_ as one whole process by the common people it was
affecting, because presently they could read and discuss and
communicate, and because they went about and saw things as no
commonalty had ever done before.
LIX
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS
The institutions and customs and political ideas of the ancient
civilizations grew up slowly, age by age, no man designing and no man
foreseeing. It was only in that great century of human adolescence, the
sixth century B.C., that men began to think clearly about their
relations to one another, and first to question and first propose to
alter and rearrange the established beliefs and laws and methods of
human government.