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.