Part 9

A stable, though responsible, executive, invested with a reasonable amount of authority, commanding the general confidence of the people, and capable of exercising forecast and governing on a plan, especially with regard to foreign affairs, is a necessity of civilized life. How is it to be secured for the future to England? Have reforming statesmen asked themselves that momentous question, or has the necessity of answering it been hidden from their eyes by the illusion which surrounds the “ancient throne?” What basis has Government at present but party? Is not that crisis crumbling to pieces? Is not the Liberal party in the House of Commons split up into discordant sections and held together solely by the authority of a leader in his seventy-fifth year and without any visible heir of his power? Have not the Irish entirely severed themselves from it and taken up a position which renders a reunion with them hopeless? Is not even the Tory party, though as a party of reaction less exposed to disintegration than a party of progress, went by divergent tendencies towards Conservatism on one side and Tory democracy on the other? Is not everybody at a loss to conceive how, after next election, and when the number of Parnellites shall have been increased, a party broad and strong enough to support a government is to be formed? The disintegration is not confined to England; it extends to all countries in which Parliamentary institutions prevail. It is extending now to the United States, where the reforming Republicans voted in the Presidential election; and the other day the Liberal party in Belgium suddenly split in two. The consequences everywhere are the fatal instability and weakness of government, the only exception being Germany, where Bismarck holds himself above party, governs on a principle really monarchical, and makes up a majority from any quarter that he can? France, with her Chamber full of Sectionalism, cabal and unruly ambition, lives always on the brink of administrative anarchy: industry and commerce never knowing whether next day they will have the shelter of a government over their heads. The Executive in the United States stands on an independent though elective footing; if it depended for its existence from day to day on the factions of Congress, chaos would soon come. Is there any prospect of a return to party union and solidity? As intellects grow more active, idiosyncracies more pronounced, ambitions more numerous and keen, is it likely that divergences will become fewer and that patient submission to party discipline will increase? Is not the tendency everywhere the opposite way? What permanent claim has party on the allegiance of a moral being? What is it but a soft name for faction, the bane of States? Why should a good citizen surrender his conscience to it? Why should good citizens for ever divide themselves into two hostile camps, and wage political war against each other? Is an unpatriotic and anti-social principle to be accepted as the last word of politics? The supply of organic questions cannot be inexhaustible. When it is exhausted and divisions of principle have disappeared, on what ground of reason or moral motive are parties to rest? Must they not thenceforth become factions pure and simple? Have they not become factions pure and simple, whenever organic questions have ceased to be at issue? Party has been the organ by which in England the Long Revolution has been conducted to its issue, and power has been gradually wrested from the Crown and transferred to the Commons. Hence the belief, shared by the whole of Europe, that party was inseparable from Parliamentary institutions, and that in no other way could free government be carried on. If free government can be carried on in no other way, the prospect is dark, for party is apparently doomed, alike by morality and by the growing tendencies of the age. But there is obviously one other way at least in which free government can be carried on. Instead of making office the prize of a perpetual faction fight, the members of the Executive Council of State may be regularly elected by the Members of the Legislature for a term certain, under such a system with regard to the rotation of vacancies as may at once secure sufficient harmony between the two bodies and a sufficient continuity in the executive government. The responsibility of the Executive for the decisions of the Legislature, and its obligation to resign upon every Legislative defeat, which is a mere accident of English history and devoid of rational foundation, would then cease. The Legislature and the Executive would be at liberty each to do its own work. The Executive would be national, and would receive the general support of the community instead of being an object of organized hostility to half of it; it would be stable instead of being as it is now throughout Europe ephemeral as well as weak. Responsibility on the part of its members instead of being diminished would be increased. It would become individual, whereas now it is only collective, the whole Cabinet and the party majority being bound to support each Minister whatever may be his failure in duty. Personal aptitude might be considered in the elections to the offices, whereas at present little can be considered beyond the necessity of providing for all the leaders, and a good financier or Minister of Marine would not be turned out because he was in the minority on a Franchise Bill.

The nations have been so much engaged in taking authority out of bad hands, that they have forgotten that it is a good and necessary thing in itself. Government has become dangerously weak. The greater part of its energy is now expended, not in the work of administration, but in preserving its own existence. Not only is it exposed to the incessant attacks of an Opposition whose business is to traduce and harass it, but it is now hardly able to sustain itself against the irresponsible power of the press, wielded nobody knows by whom, but often under secret influences, which are a great and growing danger in all communities. To keep the popular favor, which is to them the breath of life, the members of the Cabinet have to be always on the stump, reserving to themselves little time for rest or reflection, and the stump orator is rapidly superseding the statesman. This vacillation of policy on the Egyptian question, the consequences of which all have been deploring, has not been so much that of the Government as that of the nation itself worrying and distracting the Government through the press. A country with an Empire and a world-wide diplomacy cannot afford to have an Executive, the policy of which is always shifting with the wind of opinion, and which can exercise no forecast, because it is not sure of its existence for an hour. In India, the danger is not so much from native disaffection as from British agitation, which the Company managed to exclude, but which, since India has been driven into the vortex of British politics, a party Government has no power to control. Those who are as far as is the writer of this paper from being Imperialists, must see, nevertheless, that while the Empire exists it creates a special necessity for a strong and undemagogic Government, and that on any hypothesis, a disruption, or general dissolution from a collapse of the central authority, is not the thing to be desired. The Radicals themselves are saying that what the country now wants is a strong government, by which, however, people often mean a government strongly imbued with their own ideas.

England ought not to be very much in love with the party system at this moment, for it has well-nigh laid her, with all her greatness and her glory, at the feet of Messrs. Healy and Biggar. Faction and nothing but faction has brought her to the verge of a dismemberment, which, by carving a hostile Republic out of her side, would reduce her to a second-rate Power, and condemn her to play a subordinate instead of a leading part in the march of European civilization. “England has lost heart” is the exalting cry of Mr. Parnell. She has lost heart because she is betrayed by faction, seeking under highly philanthropic and philosophic pretences to climb into power by bartering the unity of the nation for the Irish vote. With a truly national government she would soon be herself again.

There is another point which, while time for consideration remains to them, British statesmen will surely do well to consider. It would seem paradoxical to say that England, the parent of constitutional government, has no constitution; but it will be admitted at once that she has no legal constitution, at least that her legal constitution is not actual. Actually she has nothing but a balance of power, or rather the power no longer balanced of the House of Commons, which if the Crown attempted to govern would stop the supplies, and if the Lords attempted to vote would force the Crown to coerce them by a swamping creation, or incite the people to terrify them into submission. The term “Constitutional,” though it seems full of mysterious and august meaning, has never really denoted anything but the limit of practical force. If it has been unconstitutional for the Lords to amend a money Bill, but constitutional for them to reject a Bill respecting a tax, as in the noted case of the paper duty, the reason was that the rejection was final, whereas the amended Bill would go back to the Commons, who would throw it out. But while the Commons have annihilated the power of the Crown, and reduced that of the Lords almost to a cipher, they remain themselves liable to dissolution at the will of the party leader into whose hands that prerogative has come, and who can thus suspend at any moment the existence of the supreme government, reduce its members to private citizens, and, if they resist, deal with them as common rioters through the police. In the ordinary course of things the existence of the supreme government is suspended, and an interregnum ensues, whenever the regular Parliamentary term expires. This is hardly the sort of ship with which it is wise to put out on the wide waters of democracy. England, like other nations under the elective system, needs a written constitution, defining all powers and duties, guarding against any usurpation, and entrusted to the keeping of a court of law. Traditions and understandings, which may be maintained and serve their purpose so long as the government is in the hands of a family group of statesmen walking in the ancestral paths, will not command the same respect in a far different order of things. The written constitution is the political Bible of the United States, and without it all would soon be usurpation and confusion. A written constitution in no way interferes with the freedom of development which is the supposed privilege of the unwritten. It only provides that development shall proceed in the way of regular and legal amendment, and not in that of violent collision and intimidation by street parades. The system of constitutional amendment works perfectly well in the United States. The power might be safely reposed in the people at large. Men who are not competent to vote on the complex question of the general policy of the country, and at the same time on the merits of the candidate, are competent to vote on a single question submitted by itself, and with regard to which, moreover, there is little danger of corruption or illicit influence. But the nation at large ought, by petition sufficiently signed or in some other way, to have the power of initiating constitutional amendments or compelling their submission by the Government as well as of rejecting them when submitted. Elective rulers, once installed in power, are no more willing to part with it than kings. Such a body as the American House of Representatives, though it might become a sheer political nuisance, would never take the first step in reform. There ought to be a power of enforcing change, when the necessity for it has become apparent to the nation, without having recourse to a violent revolution, or even to intimidation such as is being used in default of a better means to wrest the veto from the House of Lords.

These are the views of one who has long been convinced that the day of hereditary institutions had closed, that the day of elective institutions had fully come, that the appointed task of political science was to study the liabilities, weaknesses and dangers of the elective system with a view to their correction or prevention, and that the mission of the Liberal party in England was to conduct the critical transition and guide Europe in accomplishing it without revolution. If such views are condemned as Conservative by Radicals, and as Republican by Conservatives, neither charge can well be repelled. They certainly cannot be congenial to any who exult in the prospect of a socialistic revolution. But the upshot of all that has been here said is that Democracy must be organized and regulated. Unorganized and unregulated, it will probably end in confusion.—_Contemporary Magazine._

SIR WILLIAM SIEMENS.[8]

[8] A Lecture delivered before the (London) Sunday Lecture Society, January 18, 1885.

BY WILLIAM LANT CARPENTER.

I am about to endeavor to set forth the life and work of Sir William Siemens, who was not only an ardent scientific discoverer, but one whose work for the last five or six years has interested the general public to a degree that has perhaps never before been the case with any man so devoted to science as he was. Of him it may be said, without fear of contradiction, that he has, beyond all his contemporaries, promoted the practical application of scientific discovery to industrial purposes. It has also been said by one who had the privilege of his friendship, that “no one could know him without feeling how lovely his character was. Wonderful as were the qualities of his mind, they were equalled by the nobleness of his heart.”

These two sentences, then, will serve to indicate my purpose. In telling, with necessary brevity, the story of the life of Sir William Siemens, I shall try to keep in view the fact that even his great powers, without his large heart, would never have produced the impression which he did upon the national mind. Hence, after I have given a sketch of some of the more important discoveries of the inventor, and their consequences to the national life, I shall, with the help of materials most kindly and liberally placed at my disposal by his family, try to show what manner of man he was, and what impression he made upon those who had the very great advantage of personal communion with him.

Charles William Siemens was born at Lenthe in Hanover on April 4, 1823, and was one among many of a family eminent for their scientific knowledge and practical skill. The possession of such unusual talents by a whole family is rarer, perhaps, in the intellectual life of England than in that of Germany; at any rate, in the absence of definite statistics such as those compiled with so much care by Mr. Francis Galton, the general impression is that such is the case. It is not difficult to discern in the scientific career of the Brothers Siemens some prominent characteristics of their race; and in the life of Sir William, the sympathy of the German mind for general principles, and the tenacity with which it clings to them, are well illustrated, and stand out in strongly-marked contrast to the usual indifference of the average English mind to theoretic conclusions, as opposed to so-called practical ones. It would be well-nigh impossible to find among Englishmen one instance in which an inventor has been so confident of the possible utility of a few grand general principles, that he has worked out from them several great inventions; and that he felt himself justified in this confidence after years of hard work is evidenced by his own saying that “the farther we advance, the more thoroughly do we approach the indications of pure science in our practical results.”

William Siemens received his early educational training at Lübeck, and in the course of it the stimulus afforded to excellence of workmanship by the German guild system made an early and lasting impression upon his mind, for he repeatedly referred to it in after life. From Lübeck he went to the Polytechnical School at Magdeburg, where he studied physical science with apparatus of the most primitive kind, and under great disadvantages, as compared with the facilities of our modern laboratories. After this he studied at Göttingen University, where, under Wöhler and Himly, he first got that insight into chemical laws which laid the foundation of his metallurgical knowledge, and here began to develop in him that wonderful thirst for discovery, which abundant success never quenched. Here, also, occurred what he has himself described as “the determining incident of his life.” Mr. Elkington, of Birmingham, utilising the discoveries of Davy, Faraday, and Jacobi, had devised the first practical application of that form of energy which we now call the electric current, and in 1842 he established a practical process of electro-plating. In the following year, as the result of his own and his brother Werner’s work, William Siemens presented himself before Mr. Elkington with an improvement in his process, which was adopted. This is the first on the list of inventions on the diagram behind me. Speaking of his first landing in London he says:

“I expected to find some office in which inventions were examined, and rewarded if found meritorious; but no one could direct me to such a place. In walking along Finsbury Pavement, I saw written up in large letters so-and-so (I forget the name) ‘undertaker,’ and the thought struck me that this must be the place I was in quest of. At any rate I thought that a person advertising himself as an undertaker would not refuse to look into my invention, with a view of obtaining for me the sought-for recognition or reward. On entering the place I soon convinced myself, however, that I had come decidedly too soon for the kind of enterprise there contemplated, and finding myself confronted with the proprietor of the establishment, I covered my retreat by what he must have thought a very inadequate excuse.”

Returning to Germany, he became a pupil in the engine works of Count Stolberg, to study mechanical engineering. While there he worked out a great improvement upon Watt’s centrifugal governor for regulating the supply of steam to an engine, and in 1844 he returned to England with his invention, and soon decided to stay here. His object in doing so was to enjoy the security which the English patent law afforded to inventors, for in his own country there were then no such laws. This chronometric governor, though not very successful commercially, introduced him to the engineering world; it was originally intended for steam engines, but its chief application has been to regulate the movement of the great transit instrument at Greenwich. Then followed in quick succession several minor inventions which met with varying practical success, such as the process of anastatic printing, which was made the subject of a Royal Institution lecture in 1845 by Faraday; a water meter, which has since been in general use; an air pump, &c., &c.

About this time the researches of Joule, Carnot, and Mayer upon the relations between heat and mechanical work were attracting much attention among scientific men, and at the age of twenty-three, William Siemens adopted the hypothesis now known as the dynamical theory of heat. More than once I have drawn attention to the exact numerical relation between units of heat and units of work established by Joule, viz., that 772 foot-pounds of work is required to generate heat enough to raise the temperature of 1 lb. of water 1° Fah., and I have pointed out here and elsewhere that this was the first well-authenticated example of that grandest of modern generalisations, the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy, the truth of which is constantly receiving new illustrations.

With a mind thoroughly pervaded by this important principle, Siemens applied himself to the study of steam and caloric engines, and saw at once that there was an enormous difference between the theoretical and the actual power gained from the heat developed by the combustion of a given quantity of coal, and hence that there was a very large margin for improvement. He at once determined to try to utilise some of this wasted heat, and he conceived the idea (to which I invite your particular attention) of making a regenerator, or an accumulator, which should retain or store a limited quantity of heat, and be capable of yielding it up again when required for the performance of any work. In the factory of Mr. John Hicks, of Bolton, he first constructed an engine on this plan; the saving in fuel was great, but it was attended by mechanical difficulties which at that time he was unable to solve. The Society of Arts, however, recognised the value of the principle by awarding him a gold medal in 1850. Three years afterwards, his paper “On the Conversion of Heat into Mechanical Effect,” before the Institution of Civil Engineers, gained him the Telford premium (awarded only once in five years) and the medal of the Institution. In 1856 he gave a lecture upon his engine at the Royal Institution, considered as the result of ten years’ experimental work, and as the first practical application of the mechanical theory of heat; he then indicated the economic considerations which encouraged him to persevere in his experiments, pointing out that the total national expenditure for steam-coal alone amounted to eight millions sterling per year, of which at least two-thirds might be saved!

His efforts to improve the steam-engine, however, were speedily followed by a still more important application of the mechanical theory of heat to industrial purposes. In 1857 his younger brother, and then pupil, Frederick (who, since the death of Sir William, has undertaken the sole charge of the development of this branch of his elder brother’s work), suggested to him the employment of regenerators for the purpose of saving some of the heat wasted in metallurgical operations, and for four years he labored to attain this result, constructing several different forms of furnace. His chief practical difficulties arose from the use of solid fuel—coal or coke—but when, in 1859, he hit upon the plan of converting the solid fuel into gaseous, which he did by the aid of his gas-producer, he found that the results obtained with his regenerators exceeded his most sanguine expectations. In 1861 the first practical regenerative gas furnace was erected at the glass works of Messrs. Chance Bros. in Manchester, and it was found to be very economical in its results. Early in 1862 the attention of Faraday was drawn to this matter, and on June 20 of the same year, that prince of experimentalists appeared before the Royal Institution audience for the last time to explain the wonderful simplicity, economy, and power of the Siemens regenerative gas furnace. Age and experience have not diminished the high estimation in which it is held; after nearly twenty years of continuous working and extended application, Sir Henry Bessemer described it in 1880 as an “invention which was at once the most philosophic in principle, the most powerful in action, and the most economic, of all the contrivances for producing heat by the combustion of coal.”