Science in Public Affairs 

 VII 



A visitor to any of the goods stations of the 

 railways running into London from the north, 

 will see any day of the year, but more particularly 

 in the autumn, vast numbers of coal-laden trucks 

 awaiting delivery. It may be said of at least two 

 of the northern railway systems, that they exist for 

 the purpose of carrying coal to London. The 

 traveller who is carried, in about two hours, from 

 St. Pancras to Nottingham in a luxurious restaurant 

 car may imagine that the Midland Railway is de- 

 signed and administered for his benefit and com- 

 fort. But that is an illusion of the unreflecting 

 citizen. The truth is, that the luxurious restaurant 

 car is itself a bye-product of the coal traffic. In 

 the eyes of the representative railway engineer the 

 cities of England are, primarily just the terminal 

 yards of the collieries ; and the citizens themselves, 

 according to his ethical scheme, rank in status and 

 civic worth in proportion to the capacity of their 

 respective factory furnaces. With literal and his- 

 torical accuracy, the typical railway engineer sees 

 the modern locomotive as just an elaborated pit 

 pump-engine placed on wheels, and engaged all 

 day in hauling coal-laden trollies from the pit mouth 

 to the cities, and all night in hauling them back 

 empty. To the railway engineer, science is a means 

 of transmuting the energy of coal into cities and 

 citizens. It follows that his policy of city develop- 

 ment or, as one should rather say, urban expansion 

 leans to the erection and multiplication of lofty 



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