COACH LEGISLATION 195 



carrier or other person whatsoever shall travel 

 with any wain, cart, or carriage Avith more than 

 two wheels, nor ahove the weight of twenty 

 hundred, nor shall draw any wain, cart, or car- 

 riage with more than five horses at once." This 

 was confirmed in 1629. It seems an arbitrary and 

 merely freakish act, thus to interfere with the 

 traffic of the roads ; but we must remember what 

 those roads were like, and consider that our 

 ancestors were not irrational j^uppets, but living, 

 breathing, and reasoning men, whose doings, when 

 considered in relation with the times, the limita- 

 tions that obscured their view, and the disabilities 

 that surrounded them, were eminently logical. 

 It is not easy to be wiser than one's generation, 

 and those who are have generally been accounted 

 geniuses by later ages and madmen by their 

 contemporaries. Even Avhen ideas are of the 

 CD lightened kind, they are not readily to be applied 

 when greatly in advance of their era ; for stubljorn 

 facts, difficult to remove or improve away, com- 

 monly delay the practical application of the most 

 brilliant theories. If a seventeenth-century 

 MacAdam had arisen to preach the gospel of good 

 roads, instead of repressive regulations for bad 

 ones, he would still have had to overcome the 

 difficulty of finding road-metal in districts far 

 removed from stone ; and how he would or could 

 have surmounted that impediment when all roads 

 were bad and the transport of materials from a 

 distance expensive and tedious, we will leave the 

 reader to determine. 



