664 ON THE COST OF CARRIAGE. 



London, he was able to secure London prices, minus the cost 

 of carriage. Now, if I am right in concluding that corn could 

 be carried to London at from id. to $d. the quarter by the 

 river navigation, it is easy to see that our forefathers had every 

 motive to avail themselves of the means of communication 

 which were before them, and that to a moral certainty they 

 did so avail themselves ; and further, if they could carry by land 

 at about id. the tdfl'*in hired carriages, that the stories of 

 impassable roads and imperfect powers of conveyance are 

 either relevant to a later age, when society was in reality 

 dislocated and intercourse far slighter than it was in the 

 fourteenth century or possibly pure suppositions, derived from 

 the conceit that, because some modern conveniences were 

 unknown in bygone times, the people who lived in England 

 500 years ago were barbarous, and incapable of understanding 

 and appropriating such advantages as lay before them. To 

 conceive, because English roads were bad in the time of 

 Arthur Young, that they must therefore have been bad 400 

 years before his time, is to imagine that the history of English 

 life has been one uninterrupted career of material and social 

 advancement. But the student of such neglected parts of 

 history as deal with the condition of the people finds that 

 there have been periods in which events have occurred of so 

 important a character as to form, sometimes a means for the 

 development of great and general prosperity, but sometimes 

 to induce so irreparable a loss that the people have had to 

 start anew from an infinitely lower position; perhaps have 

 never been able to recover, despite the real and the superficial 

 advantages of modern life, the solid benefits of a bygone age c . 

 There cannot be, I think, a doubt that the course of events 



c In the fourteenth century and in the first quarter of the fifteenth it was very 

 difficult for political liberty to be seriously imperilled ; in the sixteenth and in the first 

 quarter of the seventeenth it was very difficult to effectually preserve it. It is well 

 known that the vindication of liberty by the upper ranks necessitated the emancipation of 

 the lower. But when society is split up into fragments, and the theory is rife, that each 

 'class' should look after its own interests and disregard that of other 'classes,' government 

 becomes little else than a scramble after protection or monopoly. 



