THE RULE OF THE ROAD 57 



aftercomers. The club, spear, sword or pole must be held in the right 

 hand and the reins in the left; the horses and riders passed neces- 

 sarily to the left. There could have been no game or reality of battle 

 if the passing were to the right. The holding the spear, lance, ax 

 or pole was dictated by right-handedness, and to fight each other they 

 had to pass to the left. Thus right-handedness begot left-passing, 

 owing to the peculiar conditions of the battling or jousting. 



The conclusion draws itself: this must have settled the fashion of 

 horses (and riders) passing to the left wherever chivalry was merged 

 into wagoning by an evolutionary process. I judge it was thus trans- 

 formed in Italy and England, and that on the continent the wagon 

 and post-chaise were not slowly derived from the fashion of chivalry. 

 We have a capital proof of the fact, as regards England, where anti- 

 quarian research demonstrates that the postilion phase of development 

 was not long-continued or generally practised. For the postilion period 

 (dominative and even tyrannical in France, as her literature shows) 

 must evolutionally be considered as the intermediate between horseback- 

 riding, and driving from the wagon-seat or box. In England the 

 driver, as it were, jumped directly upon the wagon-seat from the 

 ground, or on the back of the horse without a vehicle, while on the 

 continent, for hundreds of years, the horse of the rider hauled a 

 vehicle behind him, and the representative of the former knight and 

 rider became a postilion. Lack of information compels me to confess 

 that the actual and detailed steps of the evolution in Italy are not clear 

 to me. But in England the postilion's office was short or non-exist- 

 ent, and in early times the drivers of wagons, carts, etc., walked, of 

 course, on the left or near side of the horse or team. Probably the 

 walking was because a single horse, instead of two or four, w r as the rule, 

 as the costermonger's cart and the Irish car to-day illustrate. On the 

 continent the teams were of two, or four, or more horses, and the pos- 

 tilion rode one of the " near " horses ; this may be seen in pictures of 

 Paul Lacroix, " The Eighteenth Century," especially that of the " Cara- 

 bas," on page 448. By the seventeenth century, as is shown on pages 

 6, 44, etc., the driver had mounted on the box, but the postilion was 

 continued on the wheel-horse or, in case of three or four pairs of 

 horses, on the near leader of the team. There can be no doubt that 

 those who have explained the rule of the road for vehicles, as due to the 

 position of the driver or postilion on the box or seat, took post hoc for 

 propter hoc; the custom had already been long established before either 

 variant arose. The extreme of the post hoc argument is seen in the 

 frequently adduced statement that to have the whip-hand free, the 

 driver sits on the right side of the seat, and hence passes to the left 

 in order that he may better see that the wdieels of the two vehicles 

 do not collide. A similar illusory explanation credits the English left- 



