ii
The Turnpike System, by a process which originated in small beginnings and ended with a revolution in general communications, made the modern English Road.
It sprang from that character in the economic society of Britain (closely connected with the new aristocratic government of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) whereby, in the destruction of the monarchy, individual action became supreme.
The same force which had forbidden great national roads to rise, to wit, the absence of a central all-powerful authority (such as was the French monarchy just over the Channel, with its great roads planned and constructed throughout the whole realm on one model)—which had maintained local diversity and local usage and kept back the proper development of the road—made for a change which should be due to private enterprise.
We all know of what value this individualist and aristocratic economic system was to the expansion of English trade overseas, and how it is at the foundation of what is to-day called “the Empire.” In domestic affairs it meant, of course, the sacrifice of the interests of the community to a comparatively small wealthy class, but that did not prevent this wealthy class from acting very efficiently under the opportunity for gain within its own sphere. The mass of Englishmen became, and have remained, impoverished, but the total wealth of the country and its population have vastly increased.
The idea of the turnpike was to give a small body of capitalists the right to exploit certain sections of road. They would improve the surface and broaden the gauge where necessary, etc., but they would put up gates where they could charge for the passage of all and sundry and thus earn the interest upon their money. They had also powers to borrow. They had certain powers for using the public rates, etc., and in general, through this system, the roads of the country were more and more given over to what we call to-day capitalist exploitation: for although very often the sections of road thus exploited were short they formed an interruption to general travel.
Popular resentment against such an innovation was, of course, bitter, especially when it extended to large areas. There were periods of riot in which the toll-gates were destroyed, and there was something like a little civil war in the matter in South Wales, but the interests of the wealthier class were supreme, the populace was suppressed, and the system continued. It also vastly extended.
While it had the social disadvantages just mentioned, it had the economic advantage of creating bit by bit longer and longer sections of really good road up and down the country. To the turnpike system we owe that development of the English roads which made English coaching and gave us, in the generation before and during the Napoleonic wars, on the whole, the best system of local communications in Europe, though we still grievously lacked continuous national communications between distant centres.