The Motor.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13811, 23 January 1909, Page 4 (Supplement)

The Motor.

Gool>-BY*E TO THE HOESE

The following article is taken from "The Motor":—

"In the columns of the press of late various- pleas have been advanced for the admission or, more properly speaking,, the; readniission of the horse to the use: of. the public roads, and as the movement has"; now come to a focus in the formation of the 'Equine Emancipation' League,'" and as the regulation of the then newly-created Board of Highways; forbidding, under powers conferred on it by the Act of 1962, the use ol the roads by animals, has, by the secretary of that league been styled • ' the grossest violation of the rights of the individual ever sanctioned by a modern Parliament'—l quote from the -' Times'- of December l'4th, 2308 and as, further, the innate sporting instincts and the love of animals that characterise the Britisher has disposed many to greet the proposal rather sympathetically, some warning of the conditions likely to ensue if the regulation were- repealed- may serve a useful purpose.

.The historical fact that our roads were once used almost solely by horsedrawn vehicles is, of course, known to everyone, but the details necessary to the full realisation of that fact have been long forgotten.

So suited are vehicles and roads to c-ach other, so impossible it is, under modern conditions of highway maintenance, for any vehicle of the presenttype to damage the roads, or for the latter to injure the lightest of vehicles, and so excellent is the provision for removing the small amount of extraneous matter that blows on to the highways, that we forget'both that there are such possibilities as dust and mud, and that when remedies were discovered \ for those extinct evils, they could not be applied to any effect while animal traclion lingered on.~ The first ring, of the horse's hoof on the public highway jsvill herald the return of troubles long left behind, the ruin of what has been built up with such cost and as the result of long experience-. :• The present surfaces, v ell able to withstand all the wear they are intended to bear, will, under the pounding action of animals' feet, be roughened and hollowed in irregular patches, rain will lie in pools, and, mixing with the powdered road surface and animal filth, will form mud to spatter our carriages when wet and to lodge in our engines and in our own eyes when dry and blown about as dust. • The cost of highway maintenance will rise by, leaps and bounds, and the convenience and comfort of the roads decrease in an inverse ratio. That there is no exaggeration about this forecast a glance at the literature of the early twentieth century will prove. As soon as cars —"motor cars" they were at first called, and it was long before the adjectival prefix was transferred to the "horse carriage" —came into .use, the nuisance of dust been pie a source of the bitterest complaint (during the railway era there had been few vehicles to stir the dust up, nor -was there so much, of it as there came to he when cars were put upon the altogether unsuitable road surfaces) and almost up to the very end of the horse s lone reign that nuisance, though greatly minimised by the widespread energies that were brought to bear on it was never completely removed. Hoad maintenance, unnecessarily expensive, resolved itself into £ system of compromise between the best that was possible and the best that was practicable. All authorities resigned themselves to this view before long and adopted a policy of waiting until the time for the abolition of the horse was ripe How irreconcilable with the presence of animals the ideal of a scienti-fically-constructed track was felt to be, and how impatient people became at the delay, will he" understood when it is remembered how, after 1949, extra taxes, increasing almost yearly, were imposed on all but the poorest of horsecarriage drivers, and how the flatter were encouraged by the remission of the car tax and in other ways to make the change to mechanical traction. Those who turns up the newspapers and the photographs of the transition times and see the indescribably dirty state of the roads and streets, involving those who used them in very unpleasant experiences—to which, fortunately, the victims were not as sensitive as we should be —who note how after every shower a film of greaselike mud spread over every highway, causing pedestrians, horses and cyclists to slip and cars and buses to heroine newly, as unmanageable n<; th n horses themselves, whereat people and even learned judges blamed the new vehicle instead of the old road, those -who remind themselves of the circumstances will wonder, not why people were impatient, hut why humanity, having invented a means of travelling demanded as a condition of its own progress should have been so extremely indulgent to its old, superannuated servant, the horse, strong though sentiment was.

But the dirt and the inferior surface and rapid wear of roads were only a part of the evils associated with horse traction. Quite as serious, as it would be to us, though at the time not dearly recognised, was the lack of sufficient discipline or anj adequate system of action to guide the behaviour of drivers on the highway. The high intelligence and 'great capacity for training possessed by the domesticated horse, and features that made him for ages of inestimable service to mankind, became towards the end, when his work was nearly done, like a brake on the wheels of progress. The driver of a horse cart could never assume the complete responsibility for the conveyance. He could harness the animal to the carriage, establish a rough-and-ready system of communicating his desire about starting, stoping, and speed, and that was about all. Though in the language of the time, he was "in charge" of the conveyance, his control over it was of the most limited nature, both as to pace, direction and activity. The civilised world of a century-and-a-quarter ago was accustomed to refer proudly to its time as an age of machinery, we know now how greatly that epithet was misplaced, notwithstanding tne already extensive conquests of science. Into numberless spheres of life mechanism and method had hardly entered. Domestic labour and street cleaning, for instance, were then performed by hand —even within that limitation with far the greatest possible efficiency —wasteful methods, loudly ' mocking, if people of that day could only have seen it their vaunting boast, but the crowning example of the hollowness of the claim was the fact that, at a time when so much attention and activity was centring upon mechanical carriages, probably 80 per cent, of the vehicles on the roads were not machines at all, the propulsion being entirely effected by animals, and of these a large number, probably the majority, were so little mechanical as to lack a brake or any certain means of checking speed. At the best of times their movement was irregular and incalculable in its amount from moment to moment and accompanied by lurches to one side or the other, steering was not possible and the means of direction did not admit pf their course along a road being de-

termined with exactness. At the worst, that is to say, when the animal was stubborn, nervous, or took fright, conditions never improbable and mostly beyond prevention or remedy, speed, direction, and even starting or stopping might become entirely beyond the driver's power to influence. When traffic was of such a kind, when action was as much determined by the propelling force as by the person ''in charge," little importance was attached to habits of precision and order on the road, an outcome only natural, we shall do. well, in connection with the present agitation, to reniember. paid little attention to .their duties, leaving nearly everything to' the horse, only attempting to exercise control when a turning had to be taken or the pace to be changed. The almost universal •practice was to drive in any part of. the road the horse might choose, only moving towards the lett when another vehicle was encountered and then seldom more than to allow bare passageway. This careless attitude, tms luck of order and discipline, wasteful of time, material and effort, if not the result, the natural and welcome companion of '-horsey" atmosphere, affected or communicated itselt to every aspect of Highway life and matters. Not only horse drivers but pedestrians, cycliscs and car drivers tnemselves, road surveyors, local authorities and courts ot law were all under the influence of this habit of trusting to the chance of cu'cunistances rather than to a thought out and systematised course of conduct. The development of traffic and contact with machinery forced car drivers to recognise the necessity of substituting order for irregularity, and

their demands and requirements :uoveu the highway authorities to adopt r. ore rational methods, but to the .ory er.d horse drivers continued uinncflH dical and haphazard, and tnough schools J a little by fear as they i.erjme out .limbered, they remained aiways n clenient of uncertainty, t leir -lei le ;-ful inatttention imposing, very unfairly, upon others the whole onus of avoiding accidents.

The readmission to the roads of this 'obsolete form of travel would disorganise the whole of our traffic system, and would render useless and even dangerous valuable habits learned long ago amid painful experience and nou* ingrained in us, and absolutely essential to the fulfilment of present requirements of speed and tiine. Association with animals as partners in labour is, in fact, entirely out of harmony with the spirit of modern life. The principles of human civilisation have been the growth of man's individuality, his exjianding control over his environment, his increasing intolerance of any independence but his own and his tendency to exercise that control and to express that independence more and more through mechanical media. The man who laboured to make the car practicable, laboured more in the cause of progress than he dreamed of.

In taking stock of what we have gained by barring the horse from the highway, we must not .stop at the more material advantages. Changes of a concrete character catch the retrospective eye more readily than tiicse in manners and ideas, but the latter, after all, count for most, and without improvement in such respects material advance would be valueless.

In the enormous progress in refinement which a comparison of the early days of mechanical traction with the present time reveals, the automobile can rightly claim a prominent .share. Though not the only agent, it has been one of the greatest and softening, and humanising influences in the history of modern civilisation, carrying on the work first stimulated by the expansion of travelling facilities in the IStii century and complementing it' not completing the influence of the railway in the 19th century. However, two facts stand out very plainly: first that the past century has witnessed a huge increase of jmolie sensitiveness to the knowledge of suffering, and, second, that this is mostly due to machinery, and imrticulaiiy to machinery that has supplanted animal labour with all its attendant irremediable risks.

Dangers which are held to be part of the nature of things and uniireventable are not regarded with shame and 'horror, and the humanitarian sense, thus blunted, tolerates preventable dangers too. Accidents, causing injury or death, due to the uncontrollability of the horse or to the antics of the wandering dog occurred in thousands yearly and occasioned scarcely any concern ; the public seemed to resign itself to this shocking waste of life without a pang. " What can't be cured, must be endured" was a proverb expressing its fatalistic lack of optimism. Motorcar accidents; m which the public were involved, were no more shocking in their details than mishaps caused by other kinds of machinery or by horse vehicles, and were infinitely surpassed in horror by the railway and electrictraction accidents which public feeling bore so calmly, and therfore it is to be concluded that the outcry against what was termed the "motor-terror" was due not to any sensitiveness, but simply to prejudice "against innovation, prejudice which for once was able to direct itself against a very real evil, and this conclusion receives additional support from tbe fact tliat by tar the most ti rrible and revolting forms ot dt-ain connected with motoring, such as hurnino- or being crushed and pinned u.ueath an overturned car, deaths which only motorists themselves risked, provoked no particular protest or sense of shock. . , The way we have travelled in a hundred and thirty years is apparent when we reflect how incomprehensiole to us seems the attitude ot people who could be thrilled with horror at the painless deat of the victim of the. murderer s pfstol but who remained stolidly and callously indifferent to the lieavj t ; j nf agonising deaths and maimed and ces by dray wheels, pedestrians were brought le,v by frightened horsesand a brief paragraph in a local paper re corded unconcernedly a "pure aceiderthave hefore me a letter written to an ancestor of mine by an intimate frerd, a striking instance to the indifference to the value ot hie. Shortly hefore Christmas, 1907, a number o street hawkers, who had been turned olf their usual stand on Ludgate Hill, had taken up their position m Holborn, and the writer, passing by, was thinking how dangerous it was to compel the hawkers to stand in the gutter instead of on the kerb, when the very possibility he had in his mind took place. A motor-bus skidded, the rear j part sliding down the camber of the j slimy wood-paved road, and before his

eyes the feet of several unfortunate hawkers were crushed between the wheels and the edge of the kerb-stone. Almost incredible, it is yet a fact that the papers next day barely mentioned tins loiseeable -anti preveiitiole and positively stupid occurrence. One is lost in amazement that the people were not horror-struck into the simple expedient of keeping the roads clean. There had always been mud and always would be, such mishaps would happen now and again and if there was any blame it would lay on the motorbus owners —thus they would have pleaded had a voice from posterity called them to account.

Thought springs from concrete things as much as it creates them. The inspiring ideal that had risen before a world dominated by mechanism, an ideal which promises a way to cure every evil and a way to control every force, given time and effort, could not be seen so long as one department of life and perhaps the most important—road locomotion —n-as still in the grip of ideas essentially those of the< ancient world, supposed to have long left behind, ideas which encouraged people to leave things to chance and unsparingly submit io narrow limitations, ana, in the boasted phrase of the time, to shamelessly prefer "muduiing tuiough" to sci.-nii.uc ioresigut iinu method.

Machinery is the greatest thing mankind lias ever iiao, physical, mental, and moral, but the machinery of locomotion most of all. In the days of the horse people could get along with untidy, wasterul, inaleit habits, and they did; to-day,.when the age of niacmuery has set in, there is no choice; they must act in wnatever they uu with -precision, order, thought and directed energy. Man, machine and ■ line road ; there is no place for horse or easy going horsey ways. A\hen Victoria died, more progress, it was truly said, had been made in the in any other period three times as long, with equal truth it could be claimed that greater advance had been made since that date than in the thousand years before. Looking back it almost seems as if the world had waited, unconsciously, -marking time, till its tragic chariot came to free if from the horse. Then, and not till then, it really ran. ' The dreams, the chimera, of them are the commonplace facts of to-day. For 50 years noWj since the New YorkBuenos Ayres road, the last of the great transcontinental routes to be constructed, was opened up, the whole habitable globe has had a good system of roads as, let us [ say, France had of railways in 1888. ; As a result of that peculiar and intimate kind of mutual knowledge between different races, which has only been possible with a highly developed intercourse by road, what would n.ivu been called the United States of Europe became an accomplished fact when, last year, the first International Parliament met in London. Numerous changes bear witness to the same influence.

National boundaries are now geographical and racial, never . olitieal, English is now the second language of every Nation in Europe and the tongue already of half Asia and Africa. The great principles of laws are the same throughaut the Aryan * r orld. Customs barriers no longer ibstruct commerce, broken down not, as was expected, because the aircar jailed ever them, but because the car—the road car—drove through them. And so one could go on tracing in some degree the share, direct or indirect, of the car of every improvement in human conditions since its birth at the end of the 19th century, and showing how retrograde, in every sphere must be the effects of the horse if we readmit him and allow his influence to reassert itself. It is clear ithat the horse in an impossability on modern roads.