Railway traveling is at best a compromise. The quite conceivable ideal of locomotive convenience, so far as travelers are concerned, is surely a highly mobile conveyance capable of traveling easily and swiftly to any desired point, traversing, at a reasonably controlled pace, the ordinary roads and streets, and having access for higher rates of speed and long-distance traveling to specialized ways restricted to swift traffic and possibly furnished with guide rails. For the collection and delivery of all sorts of perishable goods also the same system is obviously altogether superior to the existing methods. Moreover, such a system would admit of that secular progress in engines and vehicles that the stereotyped conditions of the railway have almost completely arrested, because it would allow almost any new pattern to be put at once upon the ways without interference with the established traffic. Had such an ideal been kept in view from the first, the traveler would now be able to get through his long-distance journeys at a pace of from seventy miles or more an hour without changing, and without any of the trouble, waiting, expense, and delay that arise between the household or hotel and the actual rail. It was an ideal that must have been at least possible to an intelligent person fifty years ago, and, had it been resolutely pursued, the world, instead of fumbling from compromise to compromise as it always has done, and as it will do very probably for many centuries yet, might have been provided to-day, not only with an infinitely more practicable method of communication, but with one capable of a steady and continual evolution from year to year.

But there was a more obvious path of development and one immediately cheaper, and along that path went short-sighted Nineteenth Century Progress, quite heedless of the possibility of ending in a cul-de-sac.[110] The first locomotives, apart from the heavy tradition of their ancestry, were, like all experimental machinery, needlessly clumsy and heavy, and their inventors, being men of insufficient faith, instead of working for lightness and smoothness of motion, took the easier course of placing them upon the tramways that were already in existence—chiefly for the transit of heavy goods over soft roads. And from that followed a very interesting and curious result.

These tram-lines very naturally had exactly the width of an ordinary cart, a width prescribed by the strength of one horse. Few people saw in the locomotive anything but a cheap substitute for horseflesh, or found anything incongruous in letting the dimensions of a horse determine the dimensions of an engine. It mattered nothing that from the first the passenger was ridiculously cramped, hampered, and crowded in the carriage. He had always been cramped in a coach, and it would have seemed “Utopian”[111]—a very dreadful thing indeed to our grandparents—to propose travel without cramping. By mere inertia the horse-cart gauge—the 4 foot 8-1/2 inch gauge—nemine contradicente,[112] established itself in the world, and now everywhere the train is dwarfed to a scale that limits alike its comfort, power, and speed. Before every engine, as it were, trots the ghost of a superseded horse, refuses most resolutely to trot faster than fifty miles an hour, and shies and threatens catastrophe at every point and curve. That fifty miles an hour, most authorities are agreed, is the limit of our speed for land travel so far as existing conditions go.[113] Only a revolutionary reconstruction of the railways or the development of some new competing method of land travel can carry us beyond that.

People of to-day take the railways for granted as they take sea and sky; they were born in a railway world, and they expect to die in one. But if only they will strip from their eyes the most blinding of all influences, acquiescence in the familiar, they will see clearly enough that this vast and elaborate railway system of ours, by which the whole world is linked together, is really only a vast system of trains of horse-wagons and coaches drawn along rails by pumping-engines upon wheels. Is that, in spite of its present vast extension, likely to remain the predominant method of land locomotion, even for so short a period as the next hundred years?

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

  1. What, according to Mr. Wells, was the distinctive feature of the nineteenth century?
  2. Why did steam locomotion appear when it did?
  3. How many of the principles of steam locomotion had been known before the nineteenth century?
  4. Name all the causes that contributed to the development of steam locomotion.
  5. Explain the relation between the mining of coal and steam locomotion.
  6. What characteristics of wagons appear in steam locomotives?
  7. In what ways is modern steam locomotion unsatisfactory?
  8. What are some of the possibilities for future locomotion?
  9. On what fields of information is the essay based?
  10. What are the characteristics of Mr. Wells' style?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

1. The Development of Steam Boats11. Steps Toward the Use of Motor Trucks
2. The Development of the Automobile12. The Improvement of Highways
3. The Development of the Airplane13. The Evolution of Good Sidewalks
4. The Development of the Bicycle14. The Development of the Telephone
5. The Story of Roller Skates15. Improved Railway Stations
6. The Development of Comfort in Travel16. The Use of Voting Machines
7. The Story of the Sleeping Car17. The Protection of the Food Supply
8. The Development of the Dining Car18. The Increase of Forest Protection
9. Comfort in Modern Carriages19. The Work of the Weather Bureau
10. The Development of the Mail System20. The Development of the Wireless Telegraph.

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Before you can write upon any such subject as the one upon which Mr. Wells wrote it will be necessary for you to obtain a wide amount of information. Go to any encyclopedia and find lines along which you can investigate further. Then consult special books that you may obtain in a good library. When you have gained full information remember that it is your business not to transmit the information that you have gained, but to put down on paper the thoughts to which the information has led you. Try to show the relation between the past and the present, and to indicate some forecast for the future. Do all this in a pleasantly straightforward style as though you were talking earnestly.