All About Engines

252 All About Engines habits and customs and modes of thought. It has destroyed the isolation of town and village and created a new and stronger sense of national unity. Before the advent of the steel road few men travelled ; now all men travel. Each town or village was formerly in the main self-supporting, owing little to the men in other places and receiving little from them. But the spread of the railway has created mutual depend- ence and mutual responsibility. Every man is now interested in matters affecting the country as a whole, because he can be interested in it. The rail- way has thrown upon every man the duty of exercis- ing his intelligence in the government of the coun- try to which he belongs, for he can no longer plead ignorance of national affairs. The steam engine prints the newspaper and the book, and the steam locomotive brings these to his very door, so that from being merely an inhabitant of a village he becomes a citizen of the world. The enormous results of improved means of transport and communication stirred the imagina- tions of many men while the steam engine was as yet in the stage of promise rather than performance. Probably as many men tried to use steam for this particular purpose as tried to make a really satis- factory steam engine—content if it would work at all. Even the great Sir Isaac Newton, early in the eighteenth century, designed a steam carriage. The brilliant Erasmus Darwin—poet, philosopher, phy- sician—was a vigorous and constant advocate of the application of steam to locomotion from the time of