iv
Contemporary with this first great complete model of a road in England went the movement connected with the name of Macadam. It was far less of a revolution than has since been represented. The Continent had made experiments similar to those of Macadam long before him, and what he effected over here was no more than an improvement, for it was not wholly novel.
The real point of Macadam in our road history is his intense devotion to his task. He was one of those men who, having seen clearly a principle which others have also seen, and which, indeed, should be obvious, so emphasizes it and represents it that he brings it into practice where other men would have abandoned it. The obvious principle which Macadam grasped and reiterated to weariness was the principle that perpetual legislation and experiment in the type of vehicle best suited to a road was of less importance than the surface and weight-carrying capacity of the Road. Get the best road you can first, and after that discuss the traffic along it. In certain technical details posterity has criticized it—in its insufficient allowance of foundation, for instance; in its postulate that a well-drained natural surface was sufficient to bear anything in the way of road traction. Such criticism can only be conducted by experts, but it is certainly true that Macadam transformed the surface of the English Road, not perhaps by any special or novel conception of his own either in the material or in the sizes of that material, but rather in the unique insistence with which he carried on his whole task.
Just as the Post Office had been the Government department for using Telford, so the Board of Works was the Government department backing Macadam.
These two men between them, and these two departments between them, had remade the English Road, and the system was fairly launched towards such a change as would perhaps have given us a completely transformed road system, the value of which we should have appreciated when the new traffic of the internal combustion engine presented us with the problems of the present day.
For instance, Telford himself had suggested—and there was nearly achieved—a reformed stretch of the Great North Road between Peterborough and York on a straight line, avoiding the windings of the old trace, and twenty miles shorter: worthy to rank in every way with the great roads of the Continent. This, had it been realized, might well have proved only the first of a great number of similar constructions, until we should have had all the great centres of England united in the same fashion and a habit of broad, straight, and excellent roads established. Unfortunately, a great historical accident intervened to sidetrack the whole business. It was an example of the way in which the advantages of spontaneity and inventiveness, making normally for the benefit of the community as a whole, will, if there is no central direction, do incidental hurt which has later to be repaired, if at all, at great expense of energy. The reason we have to-day the innumerable narrow winding roads of England, the lack of any general system, the absence of any system of good roads from London to the ports (to this day half the exits from London are blocked by absurd “bottle necks,” the most notorious of which, of course, is that on the West road, which is now at last being remedied), is that the English genius produced the locomotive.