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.
THE RIDDLE OF THE GORDIAN KNOT
What is our problem to-day? It is again the problem of power and movement; not a new problem, but a very old problem, in fact the eternal problem dressed up in a new frock. Our problem is to revive our old industries, so far as they can be revived, and to establish new ones, for industries, like the human beings who create them, grow old, come on the pension list and die. Our problem is, as it was during the war, to shift the population, to demobilize our great army of unemployed, and to cause it to trickle from our over-populated little island into our underpopulated Dominions and Colonies. Lastly, our problem is to secure ourselves against another war.
To-day, we find ourselves in a veritable labyrinth of difficulties, but there must be a way out, possibly several, for otherwise we could not be standing in its centre. We have got into it, so we can get out of it, as we have of many a former maze; but how?
It is here that I think the spirit of George Stephenson can help us, and it is for this reason that I have taken up so much of this little book with this great man’s name and work, and with the difficulties he faced and, undaunted, conquered. His motto was “Perseverance”; let it be ours. He did not talk over much, but he took his coat off and got to work. He worked single-handed and was obstructed at every turn. The whole country was against him, yet he conquered, and, more to him than to any other man a century ago, it seems to me, were the problems, which then faced England, solved, and they are the problems which face England now.
As it may be said, and with some truth, in fact a great deal of truth, that the railway made the war, since it made the peace which preceded the war, so with equal truth may it be said that the petrol engine, encased in a tank, by making peace possible, may now make peace profitable, even if in doing so it begets the germs of another war. In other words, as the war was so largely won by the tank, so must the peace which has followed it be largely won by the caterpillar tractor, or roadless vehicle.
Henry Herbert will vote me to Bedlam, but this is the most encouraging fact of all, for every new idea must start by being in a minority of one, such as that of George Stephenson’s against the world. The stronger the opposition the better the idea, may not be a law of Nature, yet it is a pretty sound rule, and one with few exceptions. If we persevere and laugh, the caterpillar tractor will win the peace, and to paraphrase the words of George Stephenson, I will, in my turn, make a prophecy: