Anticipations | Page 4

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"--a very dreadful
thing indeed to our grandparents--to propose travel without cramping. By mere inertia the
horse-cart gauge, the 4 ft. 8½ in. gauge, nemine contradicente, 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 Before every engine, as it were, trots the ghost of a superseded horse,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.[5] 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-waggons 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?
Now, so much capital is represented by the existing type of railways, and they have so
firm an establishment in the acquiescence of men, that it is very doubtful if the railways
will ever attempt any very fundamental change in the direction of greater speed or facility,
unless they are first exposed to the pressure of our second alternative, competition, and
we may very well go on to inquire how long will it be before that second alternative
comes into operation--if ever it is to do so.
Let us consider what other possibilities seem to offer themselves. Let us revert to the
ideal we have already laid down, and consider what hopes and obstacles to its attainment
there seem to be. The abounding presence of numerous experimental motors to-day is so
stimulating to the imagination, there are so many stimulated persons at work upon them,
that it is difficult to believe the obvious impossibility of most of them--their
convulsiveness, clumsiness, and, in many cases, exasperating trail of stench will not be
rapidly fined away.[6] I do not think that it is asking too much of the reader's faith in
progress to assume that so far as a light powerful engine goes, comparatively noiseless,
smooth-running, not obnoxious to sensitive nostrils, and altogether suitable for high road
traffic, the problem will very speedily be solved. And upon that assumption, in what
direction are these new motor vehicles likely to develop? how will they react upon the
railways? and where finally will they take us?

At present they seem to promise developments upon three distinct and definite lines.
There will, first of all, be the motor truck for heavy traffic. Already such trucks are in
evidence distributing goods and parcels of various sorts. And sooner or later, no doubt,
the numerous advantages of such an arrangement will lead to the organization of large
carrier companies, using such motor trucks to carry goods in bulk or parcels on the high
roads. Such companies will be in an exceptionally favourable position to organize storage
and repair for the motors of the general public on profitable terms, and possibly to
co-operate in various ways with the manufactures of special types of motor machines.
In the next place, and parallel with the motor truck, there will develop the hired or
privately owned motor carriage. This, for all except the longest journeys, will add a fine
sense of personal independence to all the small conveniences of first-class railway travel.
It will be capable of a day's journey of three hundred miles or more, long before the
developments to be presently foreshadowed arrive. One will change nothing--unless it is
the driver--from stage to stage. One will be free to dine where one chooses, hurry when
one chooses, travel asleep or awake, stop and pick flowers, turn over in bed of a morning
and tell the carriage