Waterloo or railways

My Times column on the bicentenary of the battle
of Waterloo:

 

In Waterloo week, I confess I am a sucker for
tales of military glory. I cannot get enough of the closing of the
doors of Hougoumont, the charge of the Scots Greys, Wellington’s
use of the reverse slope, the moment when Ney’s Old Guard broke, or
the disappearance of Lord Uxbridge’s leg. Not just Waterloo, but
derring-do in general is often by my bedside: I’ve just finished
reading books on climbing K2 and the Battle of the Bulge; I am up
to speed on seracs and panzers.

But I don’t approve of my own taste. Galloping bravely against
an enemy, in however good a cause, is not the chief way the world
is improved and enriched. The worship of courage as a pre-eminent
virtue, which Hollywood shares with Homer, is oddly inappropriate
today — a distant echo of a time when revenge and power, not
justice and commerce, were the best guarantee of your security.
Achilles, Lancelot and Bonaparte were thugs.

We admire achievements in war, a negative-sum game in which
people get hurt on both sides, more than we do those in commerce,
where both sides win.

The Rothschild skill in trade did at least as much to bring down
Napoleon as the Wellesley skill in tactics. Throughout the war
Nathan Rothschild shipped bullion to Wellington wherever he was,
financing not just Britain’s war effort but also that of its
allies, almost single-handedly. He won’t get much mention this
week.

So I ought to prefer books about business, not bravery, because
boring, bourgeois prudence gave us peace, plenty and prosperity. It
was people who bought low and sold high, who risked capital, set up
shop, saved for investment, did deals, improved gadgets and created
jobs — it was they who raised living standards by ten or twentyfold
in two centuries, and got rid of most child mortality and hunger.
Though they do not risk their lives, they are also heroes, yet we
have always looked down our noses at them. When did you last see an
admirable businessman portrayed in a movie?

Dealing is always better than stealing, even from your enemies.
It’s better than praying and preaching, the clerical virtues, which
do little to fill bellies. It’s better than self-reliance, the
peasant virtue, which is another word for poverty. As the economic
historian Deirdre McCloskey put it in her book The
Bourgeois Virtues: “The aristocratic virtues elevate an I.
The Christian/peasant virtues elevate a Thou. The priestly virtues
elevate an It. The bourgeois virtues speak instead of We”.

We know almost nothing of the merchants who made ancient Greece
rich enough to spawn an unprecedented culture, but we know lots
about the deeds of those who squandered that wealth in war. “The
history of antiquity resounds with the sanguinary achievements of
Aryan warrior elites,” wrote the historian of antiquity Thomas
Carney. “But it was the despised Levantines, Arameans, Syrians, and
Greeklings who constituted the economic heroes of antiquity.”

In 1815, a modern Agamemnon landed from Elba, and promised the
Grande Armée a second chance at glory. Had he succeeded, it would
have meant more violence, more plunder and less trade, at least for
a while. Defeating him required wasting huge amounts of blood and
money, limbs and metal. Everybody was worse off as a result. It had
to be done, of course, but it would be better if it had not had to
be done.

Yet in the very same year, 1815, George Stephenson, a humble,
self-taught engine-wright with an impenetrable Geordie accent (to
which he probably gave the name), put together all the key
inventions that — at last — made steam locomotion practicable: the
smooth wheels, counter-intuitively less likely to slip if heavily
laden; the steam-blast into the chimney to accelerate the draught
over the coals; the vertical cylinders connecting directly with the
wheels; the connecting rods between the wheels. A year later came
his redesign of rails themselves, then later his multi-tubular
boiler.

As his biographer, Samuel Smiles, put it:

“Thus, in the year 1815, Mr
Stephenson, by dint of patient and persevering labour . . . had
succeeded in manufacturing an engine which . . . as a mechanical
contrivance, contained the germ of all that has since been
effected. It may in fact be regarded as the type of the present
locomotive engine.”

Suddenly the movement of goods and people fast and cheaply over
long distances became possible for the first time.

Not content with that, in 1815 Stephenson also invented the
miner’s safety lamp (though snobbish London grandees, unable to
conceive that such a humble man could have done so, gave and have
continued to this day to give the credit to Sir Humphry Davy). The
year of Waterloo was an annus mirabilis of the
industrial revolution, putting Britain on course to dominate and
transform the world, whether we beat Boney or not. Steam, followed
by its offspring internal combustion and electricity, would
catapult humankind into prosperity.

Incidentally, there is a tenuous connection between Napoleon and
Stephenson. If Bonaparte’s conquests and the corn laws had not
driven up the price of corn, then horse feed would have been
cheaper and the coal owners who employed Stephenson would not have
risked so much money in letting him build a machine to try to find
a less expensive way to pull wagons of coals from the pithead in
Killingworth to the staithes on the Tyne.

Yet while the great and the good gather at Waterloo this week to
celebrate the 200th anniversary of the battle, few of them will
travel to Killingworth this year. There is no Killingworth station
in London, no Stephenson boots. (In 1814 Stephenson did call his
previous version of the “travelling engine” Blucher. A sculpture of
it stands in Killingworth.)

I do not mean to diss the Duke of Wellington, and it would miss
the point to elevate Stephenson into a mythic hero. For all his
brilliance, his achievements were incremental and collaborative
improvements on the work of others: the work of we, not me. But
Wellington’s way of changing history by killing people — while
sometimes regrettably necessary — is as old as Troy, whereas
Stephenson’s new way, by letting people work productively for each
other, was far more momentous in the end.

Commercial prudence is surely a high virtue, and has delivered
at least as much good as martial spirit, rustic self-reliance or
devout piety have done. It is a pity it does not make for better
books and films.