Social legislation and social activity

by American Academy of Political and Social Science

This hasty and imperfect outline brings us to a fact of history which seems to me not merely significant but profoundly impressive. With the subjection of animals and the use of wind-propelled vessels, both of which achievements reached a high degree of perfection in the unknown past, the means of transportation, broadly speaking, remained unchanged and unaugmented until a period not much prior to the present time. It is a long stretch of years from the savage cave-dweller to the twentieth century man, and this wonderful world of ours had quite a career before the present generation was born. Long before other agencies of conveyance were dreamed of, while ox and horse, oar and sail, were the only means of transport, the race had occupied most of the habitable globe and advanced to lofty heights of national greatness. Strong governments were established, vast populations engaged in varied pursuits, and opulent cities crowded with every luxury. The institutions of society had acquired strength and permanence, the arts of leisure and refinement had approached the limits of perfection, and inductive science had laid firm grasp on the secrets of nature. Great inventions and discoveries had widened the fields of activity, furnished the means and incentive for multiplied vocations and opened up in every direction alluring vistas of advancement. In a word, there was the developed and splendid civilization of little more than threescore years ago, before any new or different motive power was utilized for commercial intercourse.

And the weighty fact is that this immense and complex organism, with all its accumulations of wealth and wisdom, its diversified employments, its agriculture, manufactures, business affairs, financial systems, commercial and political relations, civil and social order—its very life and potency—was not only fitted to but dependent upon means of transportation which, as respects their expense, speed and capacity, had not essentially altered since the earliest tribes began to barter! Enormous growth of enterprise and enlightenment, amazing progress in every other sphere of human effort, with motive power, which lies at the foundation of every activity, remaining from first to last a constant quantity! Before the earliest recorded transaction—when Abraham purchased the field of Ephron and paid for it his “400 shekels of silver current with the merchant”—the horse and the ox were the established agencies of land distribution; and what better agencies, bear in mind, became available at any time thereafter until well along in the nineteenth century? Yet the ox was as strong and the horse as fleet, and their powers were as effectively employed, in the days of the Pharaohs as they are at the present time. Indeed, no history is so ancient as not to disclose the general use of animals for the purposes of carriage, while the vehicles to which they were harnessed had then been developed, in point of convenience and usefulness, to a degree not much exceeded in any subsequent period. Though differing considerably in appearance from the wagons with which we are familiar, yet they were constructed upon the same principles and performed the same functions as those now employed.

Similar progress was made in ship-building and seamanship as far back as history affords proof or tradition. There were oar and sail, tides and currents, and the inconstant winds, long before the ships of the Phœnicians brought back from the East the gold of Ophir; and what more was there than oar and sail, winds and currents—for all the purposes of navigation—until, almost within the memory of men yet living, the little steamboat of Robert Fulton ascended the Hudson River! In this long span of time, it is true, bridges were built, highways improved, vehicles finer fashioned, sailing craft increased in size, and the mariner’s compass led to longer voyages; but, nevertheless, the forces by which movement is effected, the actual means of distribution on land and sea, continued without substantial change in character or efficiency age after age and century after century until the recent, the very recent, era of steam locomotion.

To my mind it is a matter of fascinating import that the long procession of the world’s advancement down to the century just ended was conditioned by and dependent upon agencies of transportation which were themselves essentially unprogressive and incapable of important betterment. True, there were minor modifications from time to time in the line of mechanical adjustment, but the general methods employed, and the results obtained, showed no marked improvement or material alteration from those applied in the earliest days of commerce. Reduced to the forms in ordinary use there were at the last as at the first the beast of burden on land and the oar and sail on water. Yet thus hampered and restricted in the means of transportation, which is the basis of all commercial activity, there was built up in the long process of years the varied and advanced civilization which the last century inherited.

Then all at once, as it were, into and through this social and industrial structure, so highly organized, so complex in character, so vast in its ramifications, yet so adjusted and adapted to the fixed limitations of animal power, was thrust the new mode of conveyance by mechanical force, and the third stage of transportation was suddenly ushered in by the employment of steam as its principal motive power. The advent of this new and marvelous agency was the greatest and most transforming event in the history of mankind. It wrought an immediate and radical change in the elemental need of society, the means of distribution. The primary function was altered both in essence and relations. The conditions of commercial intercourse were abruptly and completely altered, and a veritable new world of energy and opportunity invited the conquest of the race.

As time goes, this revolution has been phenomenally rapid. But yesterday, as it seems, and the first iron track had not been laid, and even the idea of steam as an available motive power had hardly been conceived; yet already, within the limits of an ordinary lifetime, long lines of railway—which sprung into being as if born of enchantment—have stretched out in every direction from one end of the land to the other. They have bridged the rivers, penetrated the wilderness, climbed over mountains and traversed the deserts with their highways of steel. There is scarce a hamlet so remote as not to hear the shrill whistle of the locomotive, and the clang of its warning bell is everywhere a familiar sound. In the passing of a generation the railroad and the steamship have transformed the whole realm of commerce, of industry and of social life. They have enriched every occupation, given multiplied value to every pursuit, added incalculably to the means of human enjoyment, and made our vast wealth possible; they are at once the greatest achievement and the greatest necessity of modern civilization.

It is little more than sixty years since the first steam road was constructed, yet at this time, within the limits of the United States alone, nearly 200,000 miles of railway are in active operation; and of this immense mileage—enough to put eight girdles around the globe—fifty per cent has been built in the last two decades and more than eighty per cent since the close of our civil war, only thirty-seven years ago. Elsewhere similar activity has prevailed during the same period, until animal power the world over has been almost wholly displaced for the purposes of transportation. Not only has the railroad become the chief agency by which inland commerce is carried on, but its influence upon all pursuits is so powerful, and its relation to every phase of activity so intimate and vital, that its effects upon social welfare and industrial progress present an inquiry of the gravest moment.

No other triumph over the forces of nature compares with this in its influence upon human environment. It has directly and powerfully affected the direction and volume of commercial currents, the location and movements of population, the occupations and pursuits in which the masses of men are engaged, the division of labor, the conditions under which wealth is accumulated, the social and industrial habits of the world, all the surroundings and characteristics of the associated life of to-day. The world has seen no change so sudden and so amazing.

The next fact to be noted is hardly less remarkable. Not only are the new methods of transportation incomparably superior in speed, cheapness and capacity, but, unlike those which have been superseded, these new methods are themselves capable of indefinite increase and expansion. The maximum efficiency of an animal is so well known as to amount to a constant quantity, and this unit of power is practically unchangeable. Substantially the same thing is true of a vessel of given dimensions and given spread of canvas. For this reason distribution remained, as I have said, the one fixed and inflexible element to which other activities, however elastic and progressive, were necessarily adjusted and by which they were limited.

Now, a special and most suggestive feature of transportation by steam, electricity or other kinds of mechanical force is that its capacity is not only unmeasured and unknown, but will doubtless prove to be virtually inexhaustible. That is to say, no certain limits can be assigned to the operation or effect of these new agencies as compared with those which have been supplanted. Therefore, speed may reach many times the rate now attained, the size of vehicles may be greatly increased and the cost of carriage for the longest distances reduced to an astonishing minimum; so that, as progress goes on in developing the means and methods of distribution, the habits and needs of men will be more and more modified, with consequences to social order and the general conditions of life which may be far greater than have yet been imagined.