522 General Results of a Gardening Tour : — 



their width, and compelling guide-posts to be set up at 

 all junctions or intersections of roads; proper milestones; 

 lamps on the national roads ; and giving a power over the 

 surface to a certain extent on each side of the road, so that 

 the hedges and trees bordering it should be kept in a proper 

 state. Government ought to have its board of engineers, 

 and each county 'and each parish its engineer. Improved 

 lines of road ought to be determined on and laid down in 

 maps ; such roads to be executed by degrees as wanted, or 

 during a scarcity of employment for the labouring classes, 

 and to be paid for by parish, county, or national rates, ac- 

 cording as they were done for the parish, county, or nation. 

 By having this reserve of the commonest description of labour 

 always ready for the working classes, there could never be any 

 great distress among them; while no money would ever be 

 paid to the able-bodied poor without an equivalent being ob- 

 tained for it, and the country would be gradually provided, as 

 its wants required, with the very best description of roads.* 

 After such a system as that above-mentioned had been in 

 operation for a few years, hilly tracts, and those remote parts 

 of the country which have now the very worst roads, would 

 have roads as even as those in any gentleman's park, and more 

 delightfully varied. For want of some general system of this 

 kind, much of the money expended during the last twenty 

 years on roads may be considered as little better than thrown 

 away ; because an improved system of roadmaking would 

 change many of the lines of direction. It is difficult to estimate 

 the immense benefit which would accrue to a country from 

 having in every part of it level roads, or the nearest approach 

 to them that art could make, formed on the best principles, 

 and kept in the best state of repair. In the most hilly parts 

 of the island, a man who now keeps one horse would imme- 

 diately be rendered equal, in point of the means of conveyance 

 for either pleasure or profit, to one who now keeps four. 

 Locomotive steam carriages might be used every where, and 

 very probably a species of light carriage would be invented, 

 which might be moved by machinery to be worked by hand 

 from the inside; and in which a party of men, of very humble 



* It appears to us to be one of the first duties of every government to 

 provide the means of subsistence for all the governed : either this is the 

 case, or the government of a country becomes reduced to a mere system 

 of police, whose sole office is to protect the governed from one another, 

 and from foreign aggression. Good roads and safe harbours form the most 

 valuable capital of a country ; and so long as these admit of improvement 

 in a fertile country like Britain, it appears to us that the population can 

 never be considered as superfluous, because they may always be beneficially 

 employed. 



