ON THE ROAD PROBLEM. 375 
mitted to a promiscuous mob of peers, squires, farmers, and shop- 
keepers who are not chosen for their fitness to discharge their duties,’ 
and consequently the appointment of surveyor was in nineteen cases 
out of twenty ‘ a perfect job,’ the appointment being too often given to 
a worthy man who was needy—having been a failure at everything 
else. 
Both Macadam and Telford made their road-crust of small stones 
broken to sharp angles and consolidated by pressure. But being both 
Scotsmen they would not give something for nothing. They called on 
the road user to bring the stones to a level by the tamping of the horse 
and the rolling of the wheels, placing trestles alternately on each side 
of the road so as to compel the user to take a zigzag course, and thus 
preventing longitudinal ruts being formed. When one half of the 
zigzag was forced down to flatness the trestles were transferred across, 
and the work of forming the surface performed by the traffic over 
the other half. The forming took some time, but as the traffic was 
at that time all by road the time was not unreasonable, and the result 
was a fairly good road, which threw off the water as long as it was kept 
in proper repair. 
But a few years later the railroad was adopted for all distance 
journeys, and the road was for many years more or less neglected, 
90 per cent. of the traffic formerly available for rolling the road being 
removed. It thus became impossible to conduct road-making by 
putting down a heavy bed of loose stones, and leaving it to the road 
user to tamp and roll in the stones to a level. The operation took so 
long as to cause the road to be highly injurious to animals and vehicles. 
Accordingly, the heavy horse-roller, followed by the steam-roller, 
was introduced, saving the road-user from the weary work of making 
his own road. But the steam-roller has not been an unmixed blessing. 
Crushing down with its great weight, it flattened the road in one 
operation, with the result that interstices were left between the stones, 
into which water could pass down into and through the crust to the 
certain destruction of the road. Accordingly, a device had to be 
resorted to that the spaces between the stones might be closed by added 
packing, and this has been done by making what can only be described 
as a soup of dirt and water and pouring it upon the stones and brushing 
and rolling this liquid mud into the crust of the road. The road thus 
when opened for use is crusted with a coating of stones whose only 
binding is water thickened with dirt, or perhaps dirt diluted with water 
is the proper description. The result is that it can never be a good 
road in wet weather, and can never be a good road in dry weather. Ae 
long as it is in a slightly damp state, and not subjected to severe wet 
weather or long-continued drought, it may be a fairly good road. In 
wet weather water can get in where it has come out, reproducing the 
mud soup, and the traffic squeezes it up and out of the road. In dry 
weather the binding being reduced in bulk and loosened by the evapora- 
tion of the moisture, which gave the inserted dirt some cohesion, the 
stones move and are picked out of the surface, and so holes are left 
for the water to lodge in the dirt below when again rain begins to fall. 
What would Macadam say if he could visit the scene of his scientific 
