Powerhouse of the World, — Europe vibrated with power as never before: with technical power, economic power, cultural power, intercontinental power. Its prime symbols were its engines—the locomotives, the gasworks, the electric dynamos.
Europeans, in fact, were made to feel not only powerful but superior. Its losers and victims consisted of all the people and peoples who could not adapt, or could not compete—the peasants, the hand-weavers, the urban poor; the colonial peoples; the Irish, the Sicilians, and the Poles, who were forced to migrate in their millions; the three great empires of the East—Turkey, Austria-Hungary, Russia.
The century began in the aftermath of one revolution, in France, and ended in the prelude to another revolution, in Russia. It began with one would-be master of all-Europe, Napoleon, proclaiming that Power was his mistress. After all, the potency of steam and electricity bears no comparison to that of nuclear fission. The marvellous speed of a railway train cannot compete with that of aeroplanes or intercontinental rockets. The oppressive capacity of imperialism and colonialism, great though it was, can hardly be likened to the totalitarian tyranny of fascism and communism.
The point is that, for nineteenth-century man, power was the object of wonder and hope; for twentieth-century man, it became the object of suspicion. In the interval which separates the Industrial Revolution from Environmental-ism, attitudes have been transformed. The benefits of electricity, when discovered in , were not doubted; the benefits of nuclear power provoke anguished debates.
Industrialization or colonialism were once seen as a great step foward for all concerned. They are now seen, at best, to have brought mixed blessings. The psychology of power and speed has been changed out of all recognition. In , when motor vehicles were first allowed on to public roads in Britain, they were restricted to 4 m. Nowadays, no concern is shown by millions who cruise at m.
