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night, waking and sleeping, not succeeding to each other with more absolute certainty than the acts of the metropolis and the controlling notice of the provinces, whether in the way of support or of resistance. Action and reaction from every point of the compass being thus perfect and instantaneous, we should then first begin to understand, in a practical sense, what is meant by the unity of a political body, and we should approach to a more adequate appreciation of the powers which are latent in organization. For it must be considered that hitherto, under the most complex organization, and that which has best attained its purposes, the national will has never been able to express itself upon one in a thousand of the public acts, simply because the national voice was lost in the distance, and could not collect itself through the time and the space rapidly enough to connect itself immediately with the evanescent measure of the moment. But as the system of intercourse is gradually expanding, these bars of space and time are in the same degree contracting, until finally we may expect them altogether to vanish : and then the whole empire, in every part, will react upon the whole through the central forces, with the power, life, and effect of immediate conference amongst parties brought face to face. Then first will be seen a political system truly organic — i. e. in which each acts upon all, and all react upon each: and a new earth will arise from the indirect agency of this merely physical revolution.

The reader whose birth attaches him to this present generation, having known only Macadamized roads, cannot easily bring before his imagination the antique and almost aboriginal state of things which marked our travelling system down to the end of the eighteenth century, and nearly through the first decennium of the present. very few lines will suffice for a few broad notices of

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our condition, in this respect, through the last two centuries. In the Parliament war, (1642–46,) it is an interesting fact, but at the same time calculated to mislead the incautious reader, that many officers of distinction, on both sides, brought close carriages to head-quarters; and sometimes they went even upon the field of battle in these carriages not mounting on horseback until the preparations were beginning for some important manœuvre, or for a general movement. The same thing had been done throughout the thirty years' war, both by the Bavarian, Imperial, and afterwards by the Swedish officers of rank. And it marks the great diffusion of these luxuries about this era, that, on occasion of the reinstalment of two princes of Mecklenburg, who had been violently dispossessed by Wallenstein, upwards of eighty coaches mustered at a short notice, partly from the territorial nobility, partly from the camp. Precisely, however, at military head-quarters, and on the route of an army, carriages of this description were an available and a most useful means of transport. Cumbrous and unwieldy they were, as we know by pictures, and they could not have been otherwise they were built to meet the roads. Carriages of our present light and reedy [almost, one might say, corky] construction, would, on the roads of Germany or of England, in that age, have foundered within the first two hours. To our ancestors such carriages would have seemed playthings for children. Cumbrous as they were, they could not be more so than artillery or baggage wagons where these could go, coaches could go. So that, in the march of an army, there was a perpetual guarantee to those who had coaches for the possibility of their transit. And hence, and not because the roads were at all better than they have been generally described in those days, we are to explain the fact that both in the Royal

camp, in Lord Manchester's, and afterwards in Lord Fairfax's and Cromwell's, coaches were an ordinary part of the camp equipage. The roads, meantime, were as they have been described, viz. ditches, morasses, and sometimes channels for the course of small rivers. Nor did they improve, except for short reaches, and under peculiar local advantages, throughout that century. Spite of the roads, however, public carriages began to pierce England, in various lines, from the era of 1660. Circumstantial notices of these may be found in Lord Auckland's large work on the Poor-Laws. That to York for example (200 miles) took a fortnight in the journey, or about fourteen miles a day. But Chamberlayne, who had a personal knowledge of these public carriages, says enough to show that, if slow, they were cheap; half a crown being the usual rate for fifteen miles, (i. e. 2d. a mile.) Public conveyances, multiplying rapidly, could not but diffuse a general call for improved roads; improved both in dimensions as well as in the art of construction. For it is observable, that so early as Queen Elizabeth's days, England already presented to its inhabitants, the most equestrian of nations, a general system of decent bridle roads. Even at this day, it is doubtful whether any man, taking all hinderances into account, and having laid no previous relays of horses, could much exceed the exploit of Cary, (afterwards Lord Monmouth,) a younger son of the first Lord Hunsden, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth. This cavalier, basely enough, considering his near connection with the Queen, had, like a true courtier, promised to bring the Scottish King certain intelligence of his accession to the English Crown; and, being a good horseman, he privately resolved to be the earliest, if his interest would not avail to make him the official bearer of the great intelligence. The Queen died on the last day (as

it was then considered) of 1602, i. e. on the 24th of March, 1603. Cary, though lying under the general embargo and interdict of the Privy Council, contrived to slip out of the palace, through the favor of his brother, a great officer of the Royal household. On the 1st day of 1603, that is (as we should now call it) on Lady-day, or March 25 of 1603, at ten o'clock in the morning, he mounted at London, and, on the following day, notwithstanding all delays, and that he was very seriously retarded both by public business on the Border, (where he held a great command,) and having been thrown violently from his horse, he contrived to reach the Scottish capital by the King's bed-time. Altogether he was not more than thirty-three or thirty-four hours in traversing a road, at that time not at all short of four hundred and fifty miles. This story we learn from Lord Monmouth's own memoirs. Yet we must not forget that the particular road concerned in this exploit was the Great North Road, (as it is still called by way of distinction,) lying through Doncaster and York, between the northern and southern capitals of the island. But roads less frequented were tolerable as bridle roads; whilst all alike, having been originally laid down with no view to the broad and ample coaches, from 1570 to 1700, scratched the panels on each side as they crept along. Even in the nineteenth century I have known a case, but of course in a sequestered district of England, where a post-chaise, of the common narrow dimensions, was obliged to retrace its route of fourteen miles, on coming to a bridge built in some remote age, when, as yet, post-chaises were neither known nor anticipated, and, unfortunately, too narrow by three or four inches. In all the provinces of England, when the soil was deep and adhesive, a worse evil beset the stately equipage. An Italian of rank, who has left a record of

his perilous adventure, visited, or attempted to visit, Petworth, near London, (then a seat of the Percys, now of Lord Egremont,) about the year 1685. I forget how many times he was overturned within one particular stretch of five miles; but I remember that it was a subject of gratitude, (and, upon meditating a return by the same route, a subject of pleasing hope,) to dwell upon the soft lying which was to be found in that good-natured morass. Yet this was, doubtless, a pet road, (vile punster! dream not that I glance at Petworth,) and an improved road. Such as this, I have good reason to think, were most of the roads in England, unless upon the rocky strata which stretch northwards from Derbyshire to Cumberland and Northumberland. The public carriages were the first harbingers of a change for the better; as these grew and prospered, slender lines of improvement began to vein and streak the map. And Parliament began to show their zeal, though not always a corresponding knowledge, by legislating backwards and forwards on the breadth of wagon wheel-tires, &c. But not until our cotton system began to put forth blossoms

- not until our

trade and our steam engines began to stimulate the coal mines, which, in their turn, stimulated them, did any great energy apply itself to our roads. In my childhood, standing with one or two of my brothers and sisters at the front windows of my mother's carriage, I remember one unvarying set of images before us. The postilion (for so were all carriages then driven) was employed, not by fits and starts, but always and eternally, in quartering, i. e. in crossing from side to side, according to the casualties of the ground. Before you stretched a wintry length of lane, with ruts deep enough to fracture the leg of a horse, filled to the brim with standing pools of rain water; and the collateral chambers of these ruts kept from becoming

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