sympathizers of Baltimore. Correspondence, money, clothing, supplies of
all kinds went thence through the lines to the young men of the city
who had joined the Confederate army. “The enthusiasm of the girls who
worked and of the 'boys' who watched for their chance to slip through
the lines to Dixie's land found vent and inspiration in such patriotic
songs as could be made or adapted to suit our needs. The glee club
was to hold its meeting in our parlors one evening early in June,
and my sister, Miss Jenny Cary, being the only musical member of the
family, had charge of the program on the occasion. With a school-girl's
eagerness to score a success, she resolved to secure some new and
ardent expression of feelings that by this time were wrought up to the
point of explosion. In vain she searched through her stock of songs and
airs--nothing seemed intense enough to suit her. Aroused by her tone
of despair, I came to the rescue with the suggestion that she should
adapt the words of 'Maryland, my Maryland,' which had been constantly
on my lips since the appearance of the lyric a few days before in the
South. I produced the paper and began declaiming the verses. 'Lauriger
Horatius!'[91] she exclaimed, and in a flash the immortal song found
voice in the stirring air so perfectly adapted to it. That night, when
her contralto voice rang out the stanzas, the refrain rolled forth from
every throat present without pause or preparation; and the enthusiasm
communicated itself with such effect to a crowd assembled beneath our
open windows as to endanger seriously the liberties of the party.”
“Lauriger Horatius” had long been a favorite college song, and it had
been introduced into the Cary household by Mr. Burton N. Harrison,
then a Yale student. The air to which it is sung is used also for a
lovely German lyric, “Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,” which Longfellow has
translated “O Hemlock Tree.” The transmigration of tunes is too large
and fertile a subject for me to do more here than refer to it. The
taking of the air of a jovial college song to use as the setting of a
fiery war-lyric may seem strange and curious, but only to those who are
not familiar with the adventures and transformations a tune is often
made to undergo. Hopkinson's[92] “Hail Columbia!” for example, was
written to the tune of the “President's March,” just as Mrs. Howe's[93]
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” was written to “John Brown's Body.” The
“Wearing of the Green,” of the Irishman, is sung to the same air as
the “Benny Havens, O!” of the West-Pointer. The “Star-spangled Banner”
has to make shift with the second-hand music of “Anacreon in Heaven,”
while our other national air, “Yankee Doodle,” uses over the notes of
an old English nursery rhyme, “Lucy Locket,” once a personal lampoon in
the days of the “Beggars' Opera,”[94] and now surviving in the “Baby's
Opera” of Mr. Walter Crane.[95] “My Country, 'tis of Thee,” is set to
the truly British tune of “God Save the King,” the origin of which is
doubtful, as it is claimed by the French and the Germans as well as
the English. In the hour of battle a war-tune is subject to the right
of capture, and, like the cannon taken from the enemy, it is turned
against its maker.
SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS
1. Why cannot a national hymn be made to order?
2. Why is it true that the great national hymns have not been
written by great poets?
3. What establishes the worth of a national hymn?
4. Name the best national hymns of the United States.
5. What are some of the best national hymns of other countries?
6. What type of music is necessary for a good national hymn?
7. Tell the story of the origin of _My Maryland_.
8. What sources gave rise to the music of many of our national
hymns?
9. Explain the last sentence of the essay.
10. Point out the respects in which the essay differs from an
encyclopedia article.
SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION
1. Popular Songs 11. Games
2. Popular Music 12. Athletic Sports
3. Popular Opera 13. Streets
4. Fashions in Dress 14. Furniture
5. Every Day Habits 15. Dancing
6. Hats 16. Mother Goose Rimes
7. Buttons 17. Favorite Poems
8. Uniforms 18. Legends
9. Social Customs 19. _Evangeline_
10. Architecture 20. Political Customs
DIRECTIONS12277 FOR WRITING
When you have chosen a subject consult encyclopedias and other works
of reference and find out all you can that is peculiarly interesting
to you. Do not make any attempt to record all the facts that you may
learn. Select those that make some deep appeal to you and that will
be likely to have unusual interest for others. When you write do all
that you can to avoid the encyclopedia method. Write in a pleasantly
familiar manner that will carry your interests and your personality.
FOOTNOTES:
[87] From “Pen and Ink” by Brander Matthews. Copyright, 1888, by
Longmans. Printed here by special permission of Professor Matthews.
[88] Author of the _Marseillaise_. Rouget de Lisle (1760-1836).
An enthusiastic French Captain who composed the _Marseillaise_ at
Strasburg on April 24, 1792, as a song for the Army of the Rhine.
[89] Author of the _Wacht am Rhein_. Max. Schneckenburger (1819-1849).
[90] Tyrtæan Bard. Tyrtæus (7th century B.C.) was an unknown crippled
Greek school teacher who wrote songs of such power that they inspired
the Spartans to victory.
[91] Lauriger Horatius. The first words of a well-known college song
written in Latin.
[92] Joseph Hopkinson (1770-1842). Author of _Hail Columbia!_ He was
the son of Francis Hopkinson who signed the Declaration of Independence.
[93] Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910). Author of the _Battle Hymn of the
Republic_, which she wrote in 1861 as the result of a visit to a great
camp near Washington.
[94] _Beggars' Opera_. An opera written by John Gay (1685-1732). The
songs in the opera made use of well-known Scotch and English tunes. The
opera itself is a satire on dishonesty in public life.
[95] Walter Crane (1845-1915). An English painter and producer of
children's books.
LOCOMOTION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY[96]
By H. G. WELLS
_(1866--). A leading novelist, essayist and historian. Through
his energy and high ability he won his way to a place in the
educational world, and ultimately to a commanding position in the
literary world. He writes with unusual vigor and originality. Some
of his most stimulating books are_ The Time Machine; The War of
the Worlds; When the Sleeper Wakes; Anticipations; Tono Bungay;
The Future of America; Social Forces in England and America; The
History of the World.
=Some essays go beyond the world of little things and set forward
their writers' meditations on matters of great import. Such essays
look back across the whole field of history or look forward into
the remoteness of the future. In essays of this kind Mr. H. G.
Wells has done much to stimulate thought.=
=In the selection that follows Mr. Wells traces the development of
locomotion from the days of wagons to the days of steam. At the
close of the selection Mr. Wells suggests to the reader that the
advance to be made in the future may be as great as that which has
been made in the past.=
The beginning of this twentieth century happens to coincide with a very
interesting phase in that great development of means of land transit
that has been the distinctive feature (speaking materially) of the
nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, when it takes its place
with the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future,
will, if it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that symbol a
steam-engine running upon a railway. This period covers the first
experiments, the first great developments, and the complete elaboration
of that mode of transit, and the determination of nearly all the broad
features of this century's history may be traced directly or indirectly
to that process. And since an interesting light is thrown upon the new
phases in land locomotion that are now beginning, it will be well to
begin this forecast with a retrospect, and to revise very shortly the
history of the addition of steam travel to the resources of mankind.
A curious and profitable question arises at once. How is it that the
steam locomotive appeared at the time it did, and not earlier in the
history of the world?
Because it was not invented. But why was it not invented? Not for
want of a crowning intellect, for none of the many minds concerned
in the development strikes one--as the mind of Newton, Shakespeare,
or Darwin[97] strikes one--as being that of an unprecedented man. It
is not that the need for the railway and steam-engine had only just
arisen, and--to use one of the most egregiously wrong and misleading
phrases that ever dropped from the lips of man--the demand created
the supply; it was quite the other way about. There was really no
urgent demand for such things at the time; the current needs of the
European world seem to have been fairly well served by coach and
diligence in 1800, and, on the other hand, every administrator of
intelligence in the Roman and Chinese empires must have felt an urgent
need for more rapid methods of transit than those at his disposal.
Nor was the development of the steam locomotive the result of any
sudden discovery of steam. Steam, and something of the mechanical
possibilities of steam, had been known for two thousand years; it had
been used for pumping water, opening doors, and working toys before
the Christian era. It may be urged that this advance was the outcome
of that new and more systematic handling of knowledge initiated by
Lord Bacon[98] and sustained by the Royal Society;[99] but this does
not appear to have been the case, though no doubt the new habits of
mind that spread outward from that center played their part. The men
whose names are cardinal in the history of this development invented,
for the most part, in a quite empirical way, and Trevithick's[100]
engine was running along its rails and Evans'[101] boat was walloping
up the Hudson a quarter of a century before Carnot[102] expounded his
general proposition. There were no such deductions from principles
to application as occur in the story of electricity to justify our
attribution of the steam-engine to the scientific impulse. Nor does
this particular invention seem to have been directly due to the new
possibilities of reducing, shaping, and casting iron, afforded by
the substitution of coal for wood in iron works, through the greater
temperature afforded by a coal fire. In China coal has been used in the
reduction of iron for many centuries. No doubt these new facilities did
greatly help the steam-engine in its invasion of the field of common
life, but quite certainly they were not sufficient to set it going. It
was, indeed, not one cause, but a very complex and unprecedented series
of causes, set the steam locomotive going. It was indirectly, and in
another way, that the introduction of coal became the decisive factor.
One peculiar condition of its production in England seems to have
supplied just one ingredient that had been missing for two thousand
years in the group of conditions that were necessary before the steam
locomotive could appear.
This missing ingredient was a demand for some comparatively simple,
profitable machine, upon which the elementary principles of steam
utilization could be worked out. If one studies Stephenson's
“Rocket”[103] in detail, as one realizes its profound complexity,
one begins to understand how impossible it would have been for that
structure to have come into existence _de novo_,[104] however urgently
the world had need of it. But it happened that the coal needed
to replace the dwindling forests of this small and exceptionally
rain-saturated country occurs in low, hollow basins overlying clay,
and not, as in China and the Alleghenies, for example, on high-lying
outcrops, that can be worked as chalk is worked in England. From this
fact it followed that some quite unprecedented pumping appliances
became necessary, and the thoughts of practical men were turned thereby
to the long-neglected possibilities of steam. Wind was extremely
inconvenient for the purpose of pumping, because in these latitudes it
is inconstant: it was costly, too, because at any time the laborers
might be obliged to sit at the pit's mouth for weeks together,
whistling for a gale or waiting for the water to be got under again.
But steam had already been used for pumping upon one or two estates
in England--rather as a toy than in earnest--before the middle of the
seventeenth century, and the attempt to employ it was so obvious as
to be practically unavoidable.[105] The water trickling into the coal
measures[106] acted, therefore, like water trickling upon chemicals
that have long been mixed together, dry and inert. Immediately the
latent reactions were set going. Savery,[11] Newcome,[107] a host of
other workers culminating in Watt,[108] working always by steps that
were at least so nearly obvious as to give rise again and again to
simultaneous discoveries, changed this toy of steam into a real,
a commercial thing, developed a trade in pumping-engines, created
foundries and a new art of engineering, and, almost unconscious
of what they were doing, made the steam locomotive a well-nigh
unavoidable consequence. At last, after a century of improvement on
pumping-engines, there remained nothing but the very obvious stage of
getting the engine that had been developed on wheels and out upon the
ways of the world.
Ever and ever again during the eighteenth century an engine would be
put upon the roads and pronounced a failure--one monstrous Palæoferric
creature[109] was visible on a French high-road as early as 1769--but
by the dawn of the nineteenth century the problem had very nearly got
itself solved. By 1804 Trevithick had a steam locomotive indisputably
in motion and almost financially possible, and from his hands it
puffed its way, slowly at first, and then, under Stephenson, faster
and faster, to a transitory empire over the earth. It was a steam
locomotive--but for all that it was primarily _a steam-engine for
pumping_ adapted to a new end; it was a steam-engine whose ancestral
stage had developed under conditions that were by no means exacting in
the matter of weight. And from that fact followed a consequence that
has hampered railway travel and transport very greatly, and that is
tolerated nowadays only through a belief in its practical necessity.
The steam locomotive was all too huge and heavy for the high-road--it
had to be put upon rails. And so clearly linked are steam-engines and
railways in our minds, that, in common language now, the latter implies
the former. But, indeed, it is the result of accidental impediments, of
avoidable difficulties, that we travel to-day on rails.
Railway traveling is at best a compromise. The quite conceivable ideal
of locomotive convenience, so far as travelers are concerned, is surely
a highly mobile conveyance capable of traveling easily and swiftly to
any desired point, traversing, at a reasonably controlled pace, the
ordinary roads and streets, and having access for higher rates of speed
and long-distance traveling to specialized ways restricted to swift
traffic and possibly furnished with guide rails. For the collection
and delivery of all sorts of perishable goods also the same system is
obviously altogether superior to the existing methods. Moreover, such
a system would admit of that secular progress in engines and vehicles
that the stereotyped conditions of the railway have almost completely
arrested, because it would allow almost any new pattern to be put at
once upon the ways without interference with the established traffic.
Had such an ideal been kept in view from the first, the traveler would
now be able to get through his long-distance journeys at a pace of from
seventy miles or more an hour without changing, and without any of the
trouble, waiting, expense, and delay that arise between the household
or hotel and the actual rail. It was an ideal that must have been at
least possible to an intelligent person fifty years ago, and, had it
been resolutely pursued, the world, instead of fumbling from compromise
to compromise as it always has done, and as it will do very probably
for many centuries yet, might have been provided to-day, not only with
an infinitely more practicable method of communication, but with one
capable of a steady and continual evolution from year to year.
But there was a more obvious path of development and one immediately
cheaper, and along that path went short-sighted Nineteenth
Century Progress, quite heedless of the possibility of ending in
a _cul-de-sac_.[110] The first locomotives, apart from the heavy
tradition of their ancestry, were, like all experimental machinery,
needlessly clumsy and heavy, and their inventors, being men of
insufficient faith, instead of working for lightness and smoothness
of motion, took the easier course of placing them upon the tramways
that were already in existence--chiefly for the transit of heavy goods
over soft roads. And from that followed a very interesting and curious
result.
These tram-lines very naturally had exactly the width of an ordinary
cart, a width prescribed by the strength of one horse. Few people saw
in the locomotive anything but a cheap substitute for horseflesh,
or found anything incongruous in letting the dimensions of a horse
determine the dimensions of an engine. It mattered nothing that from
the first the passenger was ridiculously cramped, hampered, and
crowded in the carriage. He had always been cramped in a coach, and
it would have seemed “Utopian”[111]--a very dreadful thing indeed
to our grandparents--to propose travel without cramping. By mere
inertia the horse-cart gauge--the 4 foot 8-1/2 inch gauge--_nemine
contradicente_,[112] established itself in the world, and now
everywhere the train is dwarfed to a scale that limits alike its
comfort, power, and speed. Before every engine, as it were, trots the
ghost of a superseded horse, refuses most resolutely to trot faster
than fifty miles an hour, and shies and threatens catastrophe at every
point and curve. That fifty miles an hour, most authorities are agreed,
is the limit of our speed for land travel so far as existing conditions
go.[113] Only a revolutionary reconstruction of the railways or the
development of some new competing method of land travel can carry us
beyond that.
People of to-day take the railways for granted as they take sea and
sky; they were born in a railway world, and they expect to die in one.
But if only they will strip from their eyes the most blinding of all
influences, acquiescence in the familiar, they will see clearly enough
that this vast and elaborate railway system of ours, by which the whole
world is linked together, is really only a vast system of trains of
horse-wagons and coaches drawn along rails by pumping-engines upon
wheels. Is that, in spite of its present vast extension, likely to
remain the predominant method of land locomotion, even for so short a
period as the next hundred years?
SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS
1. What, according to Mr. Wells, was the distinctive feature of the
nineteenth century?
2. Why did steam locomotion appear when it did?
3. How many of the principles of steam locomotion had been known
before the nineteenth century?
4. Name all the causes that contributed to the development of steam
locomotion.
5. Explain the relation between the mining of coal and steam
locomotion.
6. What characteristics of wagons appear in steam locomotives?
7. In what ways is modern steam locomotion unsatisfactory?
8. What are some of the possibilities for future locomotion?
9. On what fields of information is the essay based?
10. What are the characteristics of Mr. Wells' style?
SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION
1. The Development of Steam 11. Steps Toward the Use of
Boats Motor Trucks
2. The Development of the 12. The Improvement of
Automobile Highways
3. The Development of the 13. The Evolution of Good
Airplane Sidewalks
4. The Development of the 14. The Development of
Bicycle the Telephone
5. The Story of Roller Skates 15. Improved Railway Stations
6. The Development of Comfort 16. The Use of Voting Machines
in Travel
7. The Story of the Sleeping Car 17. The Protection of the
Food Supply
8. The Development of the 18. The Increase of Forest
Dining Car Protection
9. Comfort in Modern Carriages 19. The Work of the Weather
Bureau
10. The Development of the Mail 20. The Development of the
System Wireless Telegraph.
DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING
Before you can write upon any such subject as the one upon
which Mr. Wells wrote it will be necessary for you to obtain a wide
amount of information. Go to any encyclopedia and find lines along
which you can investigate further. Then consult special books that
you may obtain in a good library. When you have gained full information
remember that it is your business not to transmit the
information that you have gained, but to put down on paper the
thoughts to which the information has led you. Try to show the
relation between the past and the present, and to indicate some
forecast for the future. Do all this in a pleasantly straightforward
style as though you were talking earnestly.
FOOTNOTES:
[96] From “Anticipations” by H. G. Wells. Copyright by the North
American Review Publishing Company, 1901; copyright by Harper and
Brother, 1902.
[97] Newton, Shakespeare, or Darwin. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). A
great English mathematician, especially noted for his establishment of
knowledge of the law of gravitation. William Shakespeare (1564-1616).
The great English dramatist, regarded as the greatest of English
writers. Charles Darwin (1809-1882). The English naturalist, who
established a theory of evolution. Three of the most intellectual men
of all time.
[98] Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626). A great English philosopher, who
established the inductive study of science, that is, study through
investigation and experiment.
[99] The Royal Society. Established about 1660 in London, England,
for the study of science. It has had a great influence in developing
scientific knowledge.
[100] Richard Trevithick (1771-1833). An English inventor who did much
to improve the steam engine. In 1801 his locomotive conveyed the first
passengers ever carried by steam.
[101] Oliver Evans (1755-1819). An American inventor who was one of the
first to use steam at high pressure.
[102] Sadi Carnot (1796-1832). A French physicist whose “principle”
concerns the development of power through the use of heat.
[103] Stephenson's Rocket. A locomotive made in 1829 by George
Stephenson (1781-1848), which was so successful that it won a prize of
£500. Stephenson was one of the most potent forces in developing steam
locomotion.
[104] _De Novo._ As something entirely new.
[105] It might have been used in the same way in Italy in the first
century, had not the grandiose taste for aqueducts prevailed.
[106] And also into the Cornwall mines, be it noted.
[107] Captain Thomas Savery (1650?-1715). An English engineer who made
one of the first steam engines in 1705, working in connection with
Thomas Newcome.
[108] James Watt (1736-1819). A Scotch inventor who in 1765 perfected
the condensing steam engine.
[109] Palæoferric creature. Ancient iron creature.
[110] _Cul-de-sac._ A passage closed at one end.
[111] Utopian. In 1516 Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) wrote about an
island called Utopia on which was an ideal government. The word
“Utopian” means “ideal beyond hope of attainment”.
[112] _Nemine contradicente._ No one saying anything against it.
[113] It might be worse. If the biggest horses had been Shetland
ponies, we should be traveling now in railway carriages to hold two
each side at a maximum speed of perhaps twenty miles an hour. There is
hardly any reason, beyond this tradition of the horse, why the railway
carriage should not be even nine or ten feet wide, the width that is,
of the smallest room in which people can live in comfort, hung on such
springs and wheels as would effectually destroy all vibration, and
furnished with all the equipment of comfortable chambers.
THE WRITING OF ESSAYS
By CHARLES S. BROOKS