period. ‘That railways are inadequate appears/ Indubitable now.** [hese are not the words of a frustrated commuter in 2002 but those of 1890s’ poet John Davidson in ‘The Testament of Sir Simon Simplex Concerning Automobilism’, a poem first published in The New Age in 1908. ‘Simplex’ was a brand name briefly used by the Mercedes motor company in the early years of the twentieth century. Davidson's poem contrasts two modes of transport and finds the political significance of cars preferable to that of trains, Railways are condemned for being ‘democratic, vulgar, laic’ because they marshal together all classes and sections of society: ‘Bankers and brokers, merchants, mendicants,/ Booked in the same train like a swarm of ants’. Motorcars, however, emphasise the individual over the mass, for although ‘the train commands, the automobile serves’. The ‘privacy and pride’ of the car expresses the ‘Will to be the Individual’ rather than the ‘Will to be the Mob’ inherent in rail travel. Davidson's debt to Nietzsche is