Since that famous Brusselton gathering, the noise of which has long
deafened the world to the wonder of its sound, what changes do we see! A
whole earth rejuvenated, as humanity, like a shuttle, works the woof of
a new civilization through the warp of an old. Civilization is built on
movement, and the picture of life to-day is as different from that of
1825, in rough proportion, as a cinema show differs from a neolithic
rock painting. In this short hundred years, the life span of a very old
man, such a revolution has been brought about by the locomotive that the
world has been reborn. And, to our limited intelligence, always that of
a child, we have forgotten the events of this first birthday; and the
changes, which it conjured out of the depths of ignorance, are to-day
accepted by us all as the essentials of our surroundings and as
necessitous to our lives.
If some magician could appear to-day, and, by a wave of his wand, banish
all railroads to limbo, a calamity would fall upon this world to which
no parallel could be found since Noah entered the Ark. The greatest
plagues, famines and wars would vanish like wisps of smoke into the
night, when compared to its all-consuming horror. It would be like
dragging out of the human body the arterial and venous systems, and yet
leaving the man alive, an aching mass of bones and fiery nerves. The
picture is indescribable, it is beyond the grasp of intelligence to grip
it, and yet, in 1825, the ancestors, the grandfathers, and great
grandfathers, and great grandmothers, too, of all the little men who in
1925 were dressed in dinner jackets (or tuxedo, as they call it over the
Atlantic) morning coats and lounge suits, made to measure and “off the
peg,” were shouting down George Stephenson, even more boisterously than
their grandsons and great grandsons this year shouted him up. This, then
is the protean problem, that eternal truth overlooked as we read in our
newspapers that a workman has been killed in Walworth or a girl has
deposited a baby outside an A.B.C. in the Strand, and so on, _ad
infinitum_, the long categories of the normalities of life. This is the
inner problem George Stephenson has to teach us, and let us consider it,
for it is a live and moving problem, and one which will not be
masticated by very ordinary men, as they gulp down their beer, their
port or iced water. It is the problem of “‘Hail, king of the Jews,’ one
day and ‘Crucify Him’ the next.” It is, as I say, the veritable protean
problem of humanity, and nine hundred and ninety-nine human beings out
of every thousand are very, very, ordinary men.