ABSTRACT
The Importance of Transport.—Throughout all its stages, the course taken by the Industrial Revolution has been determined by improvements in the means of communication. The movement began with the advances in navigation which opened up to European traders the distant markets of Asia, Africa and America. It was carried on by developments in road and inland water transport, which enabled domestic markets to be exploited more thoroughly. It reached its latest stage with the railway and the steamship, which annihilated space, opened up the inaccessible interiors of continents, and established regular communication between the most distant parts of the earth. The influence of transport is not exhausted. The automobile and the aeroplane contain within them the seeds of future developments, which will doubtless become visible in the next generation or two. Every improvement in communication widens the market, augments the circulation of goods, and carries international division of labour to a further stage. It was the development of transport facilities that made a world economy possible, and it is their continual improvement that keeps the world economy in being, in face of the many disruptive agencies that threaten to destroy it. The centripetal influence of transport helps to counteract the centrifugal forces of political and economic nationalism. On the issue of the contest between these two tendencies, the future of modern civilization largely depends.
