10 
Jethro Tall : his Life, Times, and Teaching. 
These miserable and dangerous roads, the ruts often by 
measurement four feet deep, with the wrecks of broken-down 
waggons strewed by the roadside, led to provincial towns very 
different from those which exist in our day. Manchester was a 
poor, ill-built market-town, with a population, all numbered, of 
some 6,000 souls. Birmingham was a much smaller place, and 
Leeds was a town only a little larger than Birmingham. 
The roads, such as they were in those days, traversed thou- 
sands of square miles of moors, or furze-breaks, or fens, which 
are now in our day smiling cornfields. One-half the area of 
the kingdom was then moor, foi'est, or fen — and the population 
of England did not exceed 5^ millions. Comtjlons and common 
fields prevailed, with a consequent intermixture and debasement 
of stock, amongst which infectious diseases, scab and rot, and 
every other sort of plague of a like nature, were disastrously 
rampant. Tull complains bitterly of damage done and quarrels 
caused by stray sheep. The statute-book since Tull's time 
contains thousands of Enclosure Acts ; ten thousand square 
miles or more have been reclaimed at the sole cost of the 
landowner. Without any expenditure of public money, a fourth 
part of England has been turned from a wild to a garden. To 
understand Tull and his times it should always be borne in 
mind that in his day and long afterwards England was a wheat- 
exporting country ; the products of the soil at that time far 
exceeded in value the fruits of industry. 
Born as the present generation is to steam transit by land 
and by sea, it is diSicult in our day to appreciate in any sense 
the difiiculties in old times, before soldiers and Macadam con- 
structed scientific roads. Difficulties of locomotion not only pre- 
vented the fusion of persons and of classes, but the well-springs of 
intelligence and education were dammed at their source, and the 
general distribution of food and commodities was rendered well- 
nigh impossible. Sir Walter Scott said he knew a man who 
remembered the Scotch mail arriving in Edinburgh from London 
— all England addressing all Scotland with one letter. Civilisa- 
tion, indeed, advances hand in hand with locomotion. 
The agricultural produce carried on the then existing infamous 
roads was comparatively inconsiderable. Transport from London 
to Birmingham was 71. a ton ; from London to Exeter, 12^. In 
1G9G the wliole wheat, rye, barley, oats and beans annually grown 
in England was computed at less than ten millions of quarters. 
Wheat was grown only on strong land ; the quantity estimated 
at two millions of quarters ; and it was exported or consumed 
exclusively by well-to-do persons. The sheep and the oxen of 
those days, when, generally speaking, green crops were unknown, 
