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CHAPTER IV
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ROADS
I
The modern tourist who bowls along in his private motor-car over highways smooth as a floor through almost every part of Europe, or the sight-seer of modest means who employs the more plebeian means of transport, can little appreciate what land travel meant a century and a half ago. The Romans, with their keen practical sense and unsurpassed administrative ability, had constructed a wonderful system of paved roads radiating from the capital to all parts of the Empire.[1] It is not too much to say that in the time of the Roman Empire one could travel with more expedition and less discomfort than was the case, in the eighteenth century, throughout the greater part of Europe. With the overthrow of the imperial power the old Roman roads had fallen into decay. What had once been unbroken lines of easy communication[2] between the capital and the remotest provincial towns had often become rude and almost undistinguishable paths. Except in portions of France and of the Low Countries, the roads throughout most of Europe in the eighteenth century were a disgrace to civilized countries. One might reasonably expect that where the highways were the chief, and in many cases the only, means of communication, they would be brought to the highest perfection, but such was by no means the rule. Even in England, which was not lacking in wealth and some degree of splendor, the roads in the seventeenth century presented almost insuperable difficulties, which Macaulay depicts with his usual vigor.[3] In the eighteenth century the overturning or miring of a coach in the immediate neighborhood of London was one of the
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- ↑ On the relative excellence of ancient and modern roads, see Friedländer, Roman Life and Manners, i, 275.
- ↑ For the routes of the Roman roads, see ibid., p. 272. On the lack of roads, see p. 277.
- ↑ History of England, i, 279–91.
