... Then suddenly man woke up to it, the railways spread
like a network over the globe, the ever enlarging iron steamships began
their staggering fight against wind and wave.
Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning of the
Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the Warring States.
But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this novelty.
They would not recognise, they were not able to recognise that anything
fundamental had happened to their immemorial necessities. They called
the steam-engine the 'iron horse' and pretended that they had made the
most partial of substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production
were visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,
population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and
concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city centres,
food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a scale that
made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of imperial Rome, a petty
incident; and a huge migration of peoples between Europe and Western
Asia and America was in Progress, and--nobody seems to have realised
that something new had come into human life, a strange swirl different
altogether from any previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the
swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of
accumulating water and eddying inactivity.
Pages:
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30