bills introduced with a partial view to that purpose having been lost in their progress through Parliament, and the suggestions for more general improvements having been allowed to remain without further notice.
If your Committee may be permitted to assign the probable reasons of this discouraging result of the labours of their predecessors, they would venture to suggest, that too wide a field of inquiry was taken to lead to immediate practical benefit: that some of the systems most confidently recommended were of a novel and speculative nature; that the regulations which it was proposed to found on them too strongly affected the interests of vested property; and that even the most valuable information communicated to the House rested upon ingenious theories, which had then been very partially, if at all, reduced to practice, or submitted to fair experiment.
As the considerations which influenced the appointment of the present Committee, avowedly sprang from the successful trial of an improved system of making roads, your Committee have judged it right to institute a particular examination into all the circumstances of that experiment, and the various instances in which the example has been followed.
