IX
I met the old gentleman marching solemnly across Cork Hill. There was a tramcar in his immediate rear, a cab in front of him, an outside-car and a bicycle on his right hand, and a dray laden with barrels on his left. The drivers of all these vehicles were entreating him in one voice to stroll elsewhere. He looked around and, observing that matters were complicated, he opened his umbrella, held it over his head, and awaited events with the most admirable fortitude. When I had escorted him to the pavement, and further to his own hostelry, he seized the third button of my waistcoat and spake as follows:—
"It is an admirable example of the wisdom of nature that she has refrained in every case from equipping her creatures with wheels instead of legs, and she might easily have done this. So far as I am aware there are but four methods of progression in nature—these are, flying, swimming, walking and crawling. None of these are performed with a rotary motion, and all are admirably adapted to the people using them, and are sufficiently expeditious to suit their needs.
"There is no doubt that the most primitive of movements is that of crawling, and by this method of progression, one is brought into an intimate contact with the earth which cannot fail to be beneficial. I do not see any real difficulty in the way of our again becoming a race of happy and crawling people. The initial essay towards this end is to shed our arms and legs as useless incumbrances, and then to aim at a stronger growth of jaw and cranium. Among certain organisms it will be found that the jaws are the most immediately useful parts of the body, performing the most varied and delicate functions with the greatest ease. A dog, for example, will, with the one organ, play with a ball, kill a cat, or nip the calf of a Christian, and, when the moon is high, he can make a noise with his mouth which is as loud and quite as melodious as the professional clamour of a ballad-vocalist.
"One of the greatest evils of civilisation is the longing for speed, which, within the past hundred years, has developed from a simple vice to a complicated mania. Long ago men were accustomed to use their legs in order to propel themselves forward, and, when greater speed was necessary, they assisted their legs with their hands—this was coeval with, or shortly after, the arboreal age. Next came the hunting epoch, when some person, probably a commercial traveller, dropped off a tree on to a horse's back, and finding the movement pleasant he informed his companions of his adventure and demonstrated to them how it had been performed. It is from this occurrence we may date the degradation of the human race and the industry of horse-stealing. There followed the pastoral age, when nuts were, more or less, abandoned as a food and tillage became general. The necessity for conveying the crops from the field to the camp excited some lazy individual to invent a cart, and, thus, wheels came into use and the doom of humanity as an instinctive and natural race was sealed.
"While we walked on our own legs we were natural and instinctive creatures, open to every impression of nature and able to tell the time without clocks, but when we adopted mechanical methods of progression we became unnatural and mechanical people, whizzing restlessly and recklessly from here to yonder, for no purpose save the mere sensual pleasure of movement, and we are at this date simply debauched by travel and have shortened the world to less than one-tenth of its actual size as well as destroying our abilities for simple and rational enjoyment.
"If we continue using these artificial means of locomotion there is no doubt that the race will become atrophied in the legs but with extraordinary results. The spectacle of an egg-shaped humanity squatting painfully on engines is not a pleasant one to contemplate, nor is the prospect of a world wherein there will be neither breeches nor boots good for the moralist or economist to dwell upon.
"In order to conserve the happiness of the world every inventor should be squashed in the egg, more particularly those having anything to do with wheels, cogs or levers. The wheel has no counterpart in nature, and is unthinkable to any but a diseased and curious mind. Man will never more be happy until he has broken all the machinery he can find with a hammer, and has then thrown the hammer into the sea; and then he can, by experiment, become almost as rooted in the earth as a tree or an artesian well. It is a bad thing to have an indefinite horizon. It is a good thing to grow knowing one part of the world as thoroughly as one knows the inside of one's boots. Legs make for nationality, patriotism, and all the virtues which centre in locality. Wheels make for diffuseness, imperialisms, cosmopolitanisms. By the use of legs humanity has stalked into manhood. By the use of wheels we are rapidly rolling into a race of commercial travellers, touts, gad-abouts, and members of parliament, folk with the hanging jaws of astonishment, avid for curios, and with mental, moral and optical indigestion.
"I believe that the Spanyols and Mandibaloes, two Mongol races inhabiting the countries at the rear of the Great Chow Desert, were the first people to deal largely with wheels. The men of these nations were used, when travelling, to affix two small wheels upon their shoulder blades, and on coming to any slight incline in their path they would curl up their legs, lie on their backs and free-wheel as distantly as the slant of the ground permitted, greatly, no doubt, to the astonishment of less sophisticated people. But, knowing their habits, their enemies were wont to lie in wait at the bottoms of hills and slopes, and when a Spanyol or Mandibaloe came wheeling down a hill with his legs up he was killed before he could regain a less complicated position, or one more fitted for defence or offence. Thus, these races became rapidly extinct, and are now only remembered by the tracks as wide as a man's shoulderblades which are occasionally found in parts of the post-tertiary formation."
The old gentleman released the third button of my waistcoat which he had held for so long and stepped with me out of the hostel. As it had begun to rain he carefully folded up his umbrella, tucked it under his arm, and strode rapidly down the street. Some small boys followed him for a little time singing, "We are the boys of Wexford who fought with heart and hand," but I drove these away.