THE HABIT OF SPEED
By E. L. WOODWARD
ABOUT a hundred years ago an English " socialist " began a speech with the words : " Well, brothers, we have now macadamised the road to success, we have laid a railroad to prosperity." A little earlier Thomas Creevey, whose ideas of prosperity were not those of radical reformers, put another side of the picture : " This infernal nuisance, the loco-motive monster, carrying eighty tons of goods, and navigated by a train of smoke and sulphur, coming through every man's grounds between Manchester and Liverpool."
It happens that the Coronations of Queen Victoria and Kings Edward VII, George V and George VI have coincided, roughly, with an increase in the facilities for quick transport of men and things. In each case the new advance has been accepted by the public, but its full implications have not been realised. Thus in 1838 the " loco-motive " and the railway, in 1902 the motor-car, in 1911 the aeroplane had lost their first novelty, while today the possibilities of transport at very high speeds through the upper regions of the air are known, though, once again, the social and political consequences of this latest means of travel have not been grasped. It is also interesting to notice that the steam- driven locomotive came of age almost at once, and brought about immense changes within a very few years of its intro- duction ; the development of the motor-car was slower, and, curiously enough, the aeroplane has had a greater effect hitherto upon organisation for war than upon the character of civil life.
The sudden and unexpected triumph of the steam-driven locomotive made it the symbol of speed, often of reckless speed, for three generations ; yet railways were not new, and did not mark the first stage in the revolution of transport. The macadamised roads had already made transport easier and quicker, though at the expense of hundreds of fine horses worn out before their time in the service of fast mail-coaches. The canals bad provided means of transporting coal and heavy goods, and the steamboat, hated by sailors of the old school, was not less remarkable than the steam-driven train, even if the increase in speed which it brought was less suddenly achieved, and therefore leis spectacular.
There was for a time a good deal of confusion of thought about the railways because their success had surprised their promoters. Since the seventeenth century trucks had been drawn on wooden rails ; but these mineral lines were short, and in private hands. The first railway planned for general purposes was projected in 1799, from London to Portsmouth ; a section was actually laid, a few years later between Croydon and Wandsworth. The use of steam power was also con- sidered about the same time. A good many people can make out a claim to be the inventors of the locomotive, and it is an odd fact that one of them, William Murdoch, did not go further with his invention because his employers, the firm of Boulton and Watt, were afraid of losing him if they took up his invention.
The increase in the volume of heavy goods traffic, and the slowness and high charges of the canals, led to the extension of railways ; the importance of passenger traffic was not realised until the passengers began to crowd into the trains. (They did not crowd as quickly into the motor-cars about 1902, because motor-cars were as expensive as they were unreliable. They did not crowd into the aeroplanes a quarter of a century ago, because the aeroplanes were even more unreliable, and it was far more dangerous to be "left stranded in mid-air with engine trouble than to come to a halt on the Brighton road.) As the railways were intended, at first, for goods, the question of speed was not the main consideration. The promoters of the Stockton and Darlington railway did not decide to use steam power until their line was half-finished ; even then they thought stationary engines most suitable for gradients. Moreover, an early railway company was something like a Turnpike Trust ; the company owned a road to which all corners were allowed access on payment of a toll. As late as the year of Queen Victoria's coronation a parliamentary committee suggested that the right of private persons to run their own engines and trains should be extended to the Post Office !
The immediate success of the first public railways changed the character of railway building. The Liverpool and Manchester line had been planned as a public utility concern ; dividends were limited to to per cent., and no shareholder could hold more than a certain number of shares. The vision, in most cases, the mirage of immense profits was soon too much for the investing public, while the governments of the day, according to the laisser faire theories held by most economists and political thinkers, were more concerned with preventing the evil effects of monopoly than with organising a national railway system.
Victorian trains, Edwardian motor-cars, Georgian aero- planes : what have been the results of this increased mobility of men and things ? One must distinguish between the effects of increased mobility and the effects of increased speed. Mobility has been, perhaps, of greater importance than speed, and the bicycle has been hardly less an instrument of social change than the motor-car. The easy transport of children to country grammar-schools, the improvement in the supply of fresh vegetables and milk to towns, the vast extension of the heavy industries, the disappearance of slavery as a means of transport in tropical Africa, the opening of the American middle west, the relative weakening of the military power of Russia in relation to Prussia-Germany between 1815 and 1914 ; these and ten thousand other instances might be quoted to show the results of mobility.
The effects of speed, particularly of high speed, are less easy to trace, especially if one looks beyond the changes in the mechanism of life and tries to estimate the effect of greater speed and mobility upon civilised people. A great deal of nonsense has been written about the disintegrating effect of speed in modern life. Life was lived, and exhausted, at a high " tempo " in the cities of mediaeval Europe, and one has only to read the history of the renaissance to understand that disintegration may come from many causes, or indeed, that it is only a contemporary name for something which posterity is inclined to call progress. In some respects the rate at which men live, and have lived is constant ; the beating of the human heart has not been quickened through the centuries. Yet, if there has been any change between 1837 and 1937, the change has been largely towards reducing the waste and friction of life. We have prolonged childhood by a wiser and more careful system of education ; we have increased the average length of life, and removed innumerable minor annoyances. It is doubtful whether we are really more restless than our ancestors ; but in any case speed and mobility have little to do with our restlessless of mind. Coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt is an ancient proverb, but it has many modern implications, and if quickness and ease of movement from place to place have little to do with our disposition of mind, immobility may well lead to a deadening and dreary ennui. Life in an English village in the early years of the reign of Queen Victoria was not over-attractive, even if you had enough to eat, and it would be a paradox to suggest that depth of character is acquired by staying a very long time in the same place.
The essence of life is not travel through space, but travel through time (if one may beg a good many philosophical questions), and for the ordinary man, the " wayfaring man," the disintegration of modern life has come, not from an increase in the speed or number of his journeys from here to there on the earth, but from his uncertainty about the purpose or end of his journey through time. For all our 'peed, the " far country beyond Orion " is still undiscovered. Long before the nineteenth century men knew that in this world they had no continuing city ; but in the twentieth century we are less sure about that other City which was the consolation, because it seemed the ultimate goal, of out ancestors.
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