I must begin somewhere, and since I refuse to begin at the soles of men’s feet, which are the beginning of his anatomy, the earth is our natural datum point, I will begin just a hundred years ago, when the world we know to-day was as remote from the world as it was then, as the world I hope to point the way to will, in many ways, be as remote from the world as it is now.
On the 27th of September, of this very year in which I write, took place the centenary of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington railway, and though it was not the first line to be constructed in England (for the Killingworth railway was built in 1814, and again this was not the first upon which locomotives ran), its claim to priority is nevertheless well founded, for it was the first railway the public noticed, and, in democratic countries, the birth of anything original must date from the moment the most ignorant in the land realize its existence. It flatters ignorance to be always first—such is democratic pride.
The 27th of September, 1825, was a very remarkable day in the world’s history, one of those birthdays which have no predictable date, but which depend on the outburst of genius of some great man. The great man was a humble and self-taught engine-wright from Killingworth, one George Stephenson, albeit an honest and persevering man, a worker, a thinker and a dreamer; one of those human thunder clouds which, from time to time, beat up against the conventional currents of thought, and out of which flash the lightnings of unsuspected things—a very remarkable and creative man.
On the 27th of September, a hundred years ago, a great concourse of people assembled at Brusselton Incline, some nine miles from Darlington. There, the travelling engine, as it was called, driven by George Stephenson, the greatest genius of his age, moved forward amidst shrill blasts of its whistle, “with its immense train of carriages,” thirty-eight in number; “and such was its velocity,” writes an eye-witness, “that in some parts the speed was frequently twelve miles an hour!” It took sixty-five minutes to cover the nine miles to Darlington, and the multitude stood aghast!
But the other day, I travelled in the “Detroiter” from New York to near by the front door of Mr. Henry Ford—another remarkable and self-taught revolutionary—the distance, if I remember rightly, some seven hundred and fifty miles, and the time taken was fourteen hours. From Brusselton Incline the iron horse hauled away, amidst wild excitement, the stupendous load of ninety tons. At Pittsburg, I have seen locomotives hauling six and seven thousand tons of coal, puffing by all unobserved. Surely Einstein is right, the relative is only true, and ninety tons in 1825 was almost as unbelievable as to-day would be a centaur galloping between the taxis of Piccadilly or Fifth Avenue.
All this must have been remembered during the centenary celebrations this year, and broadcast from meeting room, assembly hall and dinner table, for centenaries lose their interest without much feeding. There, little men in tail coats, morning jackets and lounge suits, some with trousers creased and others somewhat baggy at the knee, according to the political creed of the wearer, in port and beer, and, in America, I know not what, toasted the memory of the great man. Pæans and praise gushed from their arid heads like the water from the rock smitten by Moses. These little men, sitting for a bare few minutes on the chariot wheel of genius, did say, “What a dust do we raise!” And in our morning papers we read of all this blather and pomposity, and overlooked an eternal truth. For we got into our railway carriages next day and complained of their unfitness for human habitation, even of the most temporary nature, and condemned the line we were travelling on as impossible, because the train was five minutes late. Outwardly a very ordinary picture, all this—the drinking, speechmaking and travelling troubles of little men, some strap-hangers to genius, but most quite normal nonentities; yet behind it all lurks a somewhat interesting problem—the protean psychology of the very ordinary man.
THE PROTEAN PROBLEM
Since that famous Brusselton gathering, the noise of which has long deafened the world to the wonder of its sound, what changes do we see! A whole earth rejuvenated, as humanity, like a shuttle, works the woof of a new civilization through the warp of an old. Civilization is built on movement, and the picture of life to-day is as different from that of 1825, in rough proportion, as a cinema show differs from a neolithic rock painting. In this short hundred years, the life span of a very old man, such a revolution has been brought about by the locomotive that the world has been reborn. And, to our limited intelligence, always that of a child, we have forgotten the events of this first birthday; and the changes, which it conjured out of the depths of ignorance, are to-day accepted by us all as the essentials of our surroundings and as necessitous to our lives.
If some magician could appear to-day, and, by a wave of his wand, banish all railroads to limbo, a calamity would fall upon this world to which no parallel could be found since Noah entered the Ark. The greatest plagues, famines and wars would vanish like wisps of smoke into the night, when compared to its all-consuming horror. It would be like dragging out of the human body the arterial and venous systems, and yet leaving the man alive, an aching mass of bones and fiery nerves. The picture is indescribable, it is beyond the grasp of intelligence to grip it, and yet, in 1825, the ancestors, the grandfathers, and great grandfathers, and great grandmothers, too, of all the little men who in 1925 were dressed in dinner jackets (or tuxedo, as they call it over the Atlantic) morning coats and lounge suits, made to measure and “off the peg,” were shouting down George Stephenson, even more boisterously than their grandsons and great grandsons this year shouted him up. This, then is the protean problem, that eternal truth overlooked as we read in our newspapers that a workman has been killed in Walworth or a girl has deposited a baby outside an A.B.C. in the Strand, and so on, ad infinitum, the long categories of the normalities of life. This is the inner problem George Stephenson has to teach us, and let us consider it, for it is a live and moving problem, and one which will not be masticated by very ordinary men, as they gulp down their beer, their port or iced water. It is the problem of “‘Hail, king of the Jews,’ one day and ‘Crucify Him’ the next.” It is, as I say, the veritable protean problem of humanity, and nine hundred and ninety-nine human beings out of every thousand are very, very, ordinary men.