H G Wells

Anticipations H G Wells

For reasons that will develop themselves more clearly as these papers unfold, it is extremelyconvenient to begin with a speculation upon the probable developments and changes of the meansof land locomotion during the coming decades. No one who has studied the civil history of thenineteenth century will deny how far-reaching the consequences of changes in transit may be, andno one who has studied the military performances of General Buller and General De Wet but willsee that upon transport, upon locomotion, may also hang the most momentous issues of politics andwar. The growth of our great cities, the rapid populating of America, the entry of China into thefield of European politics are, for example, quite obviously and directly consequences of newmethods of locomotion. And while so much hangs upon the development of these methods, thatdevelopment is, on the other hand, a process comparatively independent, now at any rate, of mostof the other great movements affected by it. It depends upon a sequence of ideas arising, and ofexperiments made, and upon laws of political economy, almost as inevitable as natural laws. Suchgreat issues, supposing them to be possible, as the return of Western Europe to the Romancommunion, the overthrow of the British Empire by Germany, or the inundation of Europe by the"Yellow Peril," might conceivably affect such details, let us say, as door-handles and ventilators ormileage of line, but would probably leave the essential features of the evolution of locomotionuntouched. The evolution of locomotion has a purely historical relation to the Western Europeanpeoples. It is no longer dependent upon them, or exclusively in their hands. The Malay nowadayssets out upon his pilgrimage to Mecca in an excursion steamship of iron, and the immemorialHindoo goes a-shopping in a train, and in Japan and Australasia and America, there are plentifulhands and minds to take up the process now, even should the European let it fall.