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pounds (the sum varies according to the imagination of the orator) for over-taxation in the past. A Commission appointed under the terms of the treaty to settle the fiscal relations between the two countries would certainly dissipate this myth and, if strict precedent were followed, would assign to the Free State its proportion of the debt. No such Commission has yet sat, nor has there been any move towards setting it up. This suggests that it may be possible to strike a perfectly honourable bargain with the people of Southern Ireland. Let the Free State yield on the greater issues of the boundary; and, in return, let Great Britain refrain from claiming the financial contribution which is legitimately due to her.

In any such accommodation there would be no great sacrifice on either side. If there were any passionate desire on the part of the Catholics of the six counties to join " their brethren of the South," such an arrangement might be rejected as dishonourable; but the evidence tends increasingly to point in the other direction. As for the people of the South, if they once believed that their already crushing burden of taxation was to be increased, and that their impoverished country was to be weighted with an impossible indebtedness, they would be willing enough to rid themselves of such a nightmare by accepting a moderate solution of the boundary question. From the British point of view, such a settlement could not be anything but a relief. It would be a real settlement, due to a generous "gesture," which would in fact cost the British people nothing. For no one believes that Southern Ireland will ever be in a position to take over any substantial share of the National Debt. Certainly no one believes that it will ever do so.

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THE OLD ROADS OF ENGLAND

The Road. By HILAIRE BELLOC. T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd. 1924.
The Old Road. By HILAIRE BELLOC. CONSTABLE. New Edition.

1911.

Pre-historic Roads. By HAROLD PEAKE. In Archæologia Cambrensis. 6th Series. Vol. XVII.

1917.

The Archæology of the Cambridge Region. By CYRIL FOX. Cambridge University Press. 1923.

The Story of the King's Highway. By SIDNEY and BEATRICE WEBB. Longmans, Green & Co. 1913.

THE

HE literature of the road is curiously scanty. It provides the commonest of metaphors, but is one of the rarest of subjects. Poetry, imaginative prose, religion itself, would lose much if they were deprived of such convenient symbols as the broad road, the narrow path, the beaten track, and the accustomed way. Works of travel are abundant and to spare; the literature of walking is select but excellent, for even in these days of multiplication of modes of motion there are eccentric individuals who persist in using their legs for the purpose for which legs were formed; and the subject of wandering has been popular since George Borrow and his followers sanctified the cult of the vagabond. The road itself--the actual physical entity-has been left to the engineers and the lawyers, and it would be hard to say whether a treatise on the technique of road engineering is more or less unreadable than one on the law of highways. Even in books that profess to treat the subject, the authors are chiefly concerned with the things to be seen on the road, little if at all with the thing that makes their journeys possible. Nevertheless, Mr. Belloc is hardly using exaggerated language when he says in his introduction to one of the best books he has ever written, "The Road," that

The Road is one of the great fundamental institutions of mankind. . . . Not only is the Road one of the great human institutions because it is fundamental to social existence, but also because its varied effect appears in every department of the State. It is the Road which determines the sites of many cities and the growth and nourishment of all. It is the Road which controls the development of strategies

and fixes the sites of battles. It is the Road that gives its framework to all economic development. It is the Road which is the channel of all trade and, what is more important, of all ideas. In its most humble function it is a necessary guide without which progress from place to place would be a ceaseless experiment; it is a sustenance without which organised society would be impossible; thus, and with those other characters I have mentioned, the Road moves and controls all history.

The development of the road is one of the most important aspects of the history of civilisation upon its physical side, for in a very real sense "Transportation is civilisation." It begins with wandering trails in the dim mists of pre-history: its present stage is the proposal to erect solid structures of concrete reserved for fast motor traffic; between the two lies the material history of mankind. On the present occasion we are concerned with the dim mists of pre-history, with the roads that grew rather than with the roads that were made. This fascinating by-way of archæology has been placed on a scientific basis only since the opening of the present century. Mr. Belloc made a number of pregnant suggestions in his work on "The Old Road" (meaning thereby the Pilgrims' Way from Winchester to Canterbury) but the real founder of the science is Mr. Harold Peake of Newbury.

The capital distinction is between the roads that grew and the roads that were made. In all our island story there have only been three periods of deliberate and systematic road-making. The first was the Roman era, and the Romans, according to universal opinion, were the greatest of all road builders; but of Roman roads we cannot speak in this place. The second great period was that of the industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. It transformed England from an agricultural country to one primarily industrial, with agriculture as a subordinate industry. It shifted the centres of population from the wheatfields to the coalfields; from the south and east to the north and west. The sparsely populated areas became hives of industry, and the enormous increase in wheeled traffic threw a burden upon the medieval trackways that they were utterly unfitted to sustain. The perennial controversy whether the roads should be made fit for the traffic, or whether the traffic should adapt itself to the roads, became more acute than ever; but it was inevitable that the issue should be decided in favour of the roads. The heroes of the period were "Pontifex

Maximus Telford" and "MacAdam the Magician," and they have planted indelible memorials upon the face of the country. Telford's masterpiece, the great Holyhead road, will probably endure as long as the Watling Street; and his unexecuted plan for a great north road may be accomplished in our own days. But, about 1830, the "calamity of railways" fell upon the land, and for the remainder of the nineteenth century there was no great road-making; in fact the roads were comparatively neglected. The third great epoch is the present, dating from the perfection of the motor car in the last years of the last century, which has filled our roads as they were never filled before, and has made them a desolation and a hissing to the pedestrian.

During all the time from the departure of the legions to the coming of Telford the idea that the roads were a growth is persistent. It is deeply embedded in the common law. The legal conception of a highway is merely a right of passage from place to place and from vill to vill, with results that the curious may discover at large in the bulky treatise of Messrs. Pratt and Mackenzie. Even in the effusions of the reforming pamphleteers from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries the ideal is the same : remove the obstructions, clean the ditches, let in the sun and air, and "the roads will grow better of themselves." So, too, it is still, as it always has been, good law, that if the trackway gets into that condition described by the delightful old adjective "foundrous," His Majesty's lieges may diverge from it even to the extent of "going upon the corn." The soil of the highway, subject only to the easement of passage, belongs to the adjoining owner, and our ancestors were apt to regard his rights with a kindly eye. Mrs. Green records in her "Town Life in the Fifteenth Century " (Vol. II, p. 31), that :—

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In 1499 a glover from Leighton Buzzard travelled with his wares to Aylesbury for the market before Christmas Day. It happened that an Aylesbury miller, Richard Boose, finding that his mill needed repairs, sent a couple of servants to dig clay (called "Ramming clay ") for him on the highway. And was in no way dismayed because the digging of this clay made a great pit in the middle of the road ten feet wide, eight feet broad, and eight feet deep, which was quickly filled with water by the winter rains. But the unhappy glover, making his way from the town in the dusk, with his horse laden with panniers full of gloves, straightway fell into the pit, and man and horse were drowned. The miller was charged with his death, but was acquitted by the court on the ground that he had had no malicious intent, and

had only dug the pit to repair his mill, and because he really did not know of any other place to get the clay he wanted, save the high road. Still, it is possible that if the glover had been a citizen of Aylesbury, instead of Leighton Buzzard, the local court might have taken a different view of the matter.

In modern times the legal conception has caused great inconvenience; but, nevertheless, it persists. Even now it is true that any interference with the soil of a highway can only be effected under statutory authority; and it is the magic of an Act of Parliament alone that enables local bodies and parliamentary companies to indulge in the perpetual entertainment of having roads "up." The idea is one of those roots of the present that lie so deep in the past. In the east, and in all semi-civilised countries at the present day, the road is nothing but a beaten and accustomed trackway. The way grew by the mere fact of passage, and was maintained by the traffic upon it. When Mr. Chesterton sings that

The rolling English drunkard
Made the rolling English road,

he is only expressing a scientific truth in a poetical form. The feet of the footmen and the hoofs of the horses began the road and continued it. By a comparison between the habits of savage trails and the very extensive remnants of ancient trackways still surviving in this country, it has been possible to erect a scientific theory of old roads on a reasonably secure foundation. Before however attempting to classify the ancient trackways and to describe their habits, it may be well to state certain principles that underlie the study of the subject.

First, our existing roadways are made up of fragments of tracks of different ages roughly pieced together. It is an axiom in archæology that man is a conservative and lazy animal. Psychologists tell us that to the average individual there is no pain like the pain of thought. The strongest cement that binds society together is habit, and men will generally maintain their accustomed ways until the pressure of circumstances compels them to change. Even then the change will be effected with the least possible effort, and old things will be adapted rather than a new plan conceived. Our roads are a standing example of these peculiarities. Hunting passed into pastoralism, pastoralism into agriculture, agriculture into industry; and each change necessitated

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