g time men did not realise the importance of this novelty.
They would not recognise, they were not able to recognise that anything
fundamental had happened to their immemorial necessities. They called
the steam-engine the 'iron horse' and pretended that they had made the
most partial of substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production
were visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,
population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and
concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city centres,
food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a scale that
made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of imperial Rome, a petty
incident; and a huge migration of peoples between Europe and Western
Asia and America was in Progress, and--nobody seems to have realised
that something new had come into human life, a strange swirl different
altogether from any previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the
swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of
accumulating water and eddying inactivity....

The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit
at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from
Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New
Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance at
the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinise the prices current
of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan,
and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten (in the place of
his father's eight) that he thought the world changed very little. They
must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone
to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of Horace and
Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all would be well with
them....

Section 5

Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be studied,
invaded the common life of men a few decades after the exploitation of
steam. To electricity also, in spite of its provocative nearness all
about him, mankind had been utterly blind for incalculable ages. Could
anything be more emphatic than the appeal of electricity for attention?
It thundered at man's ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes,
occasionally it killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that
concerned him enough to merit study. It came into the house with the cat
on any dry day