LOCATION.
When a new road is laid out it is important that it should be located in the best attainable place, considering the natural formation of the surrounding country; for when a highway is once established it is impossible to say how long the tide of humanity and commercial traffic will seek passage over it. While the ordinary processes of Nature—rain, thaw, and frost—are ever at work lowering the hills and mountains and filling up the valleys and lowlands, the public highways of a country remain in the same relative positions from age to age.
The great commercial and military highway which in the early dawn of Roman history led from the banks of the placid Euphrates to the banks of the many-mouthed Nile—over which Abraham once wended his weary steps on his way to Canaan, over which the hosts of Xerxes and the brave phalanxes of Alexander the Great once passed in all the pride and glory of war, over which the wise men of the East probably journeyed in search of him who was born King of the Jews, over which Mary fled with Christ in her flight into Egypt, and along which the early Christians travelled as they went forth to preach the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men—is to-day the highway over which is carried on the overland intercourse between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.
Many of the present roads in Italy and the neighboring countries are identical with the roads over which Cæsar, Cicero, and other Romans travelled in the olden days; and the modern British roads are the same, in many cases, as those used by the ancient Britons before the Anglo-Saxon conquest.
The law of the survival of the fittest is applicable to the location of roads, and any well-located road is liable to be used as a public way during the occupancy of the earth by the human race; and if it is not made famous by the passage of illustrious persons or sanctified by the footsteps of saints, yet it is liable to be travelled through coming ages by "mute inglorious Miltons" and by "care-encumbered men." It sometimes happens that men and women, in doing faithfully and well the nearest duty, perform work which turns out better than they expect.
"The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity;
* * * *
He builded better than he knew."