Old Roads and New Roads

by William Bodham Donne

But before these results were attained, the air was tried, and the water was tried, as likely to afford a more rapid medium of transit and communication than the solid earth. Of balloons and canals however our limits do not permit us to speak, although either of them might well furnish

a little volume like the one now presented to the reader. We are now concerned, however, with the social and civilizing effects of Railways.

“For a succession of ages,” says Dr. Lardner, “the little intercourse that was maintained between the various parts of Great Britain was effected almost exclusively by rude footpaths, traversed by pedestrians, or at best by horses. Hills were surmounted, valleys crossed, and rivers forded by these rude agents of transport, in the same manner as the savage and settler of the backwoods of America or the slopes of the Rocky Mountains communicate with each other.”

The effects of high civilization may perhaps be best estimated by its contrast—the rude and infant stages of society. Let us imagine for a moment the destruction of Railways, the neglect of Turnpike and Highway Roads, and the consequent interruption of our present modes of rapid and regular locomotion.

Gentle Reader, in the first place, your breakfast is rendered thoroughly uncomfortable, or, like Viola’s history—a blank. Your copy of the ‘Times’ or ‘Morning Chronicle’ has not arrived; your letters are lying six miles off, and you have to send a special messenger—who may, and will most probably, get drunk on his road—to fetch them. If you should chance to be in business, you will hear of a profitable investment for capital just two hours after some one else has closed the bargain; if you are a

physician, you will most probably miss a lucrative patient; if a lawyer, a most seductive fee. All calculations will be disturbed. Manchester and Norwich will be more remote from each other than Paris and Marseilles. In place of a railway station there will be a swamp, and instead of a turnpike gate, a wood. Mighty towns and spacious cities will shrink into obscure villages; smiling and fertile districts relapse into original barrenness; kinsfolk and acquaintance be put nearly out of sight. There are no mails; there is no penny post; the last new novel will not reach you. The Bishop of Exeter may become a cardinal, or Colonel Sibthorpe commander of the forces, six weeks before you hear of their promotion. The union between Scotland and England will be again as good as divorced by distance and difficulty of transit. Your fish from Billingsgate will be ancient, and your tailor will be sure to disappoint you of your mourning or your marriage suit. Your commodious carpet-bag must be exchanged for a trunk capacious enough to contain all your “household stuff,” except the kitchen range; your utmost speed will amount to difficult stages of six miles an hour; you will journey in terror; and you will arrive at your inn with the fixed determination of never again quitting your home.

We will conclude our rambles over the old roads of four continents with the words of one whose wisdom was not surpassed by his wit, although his wit surpassed most of the wisdom of his contemporaries.

“It is of some importance,” says Sydney Smith, (it is wrong to add ‘the Reverend,’ for no one says Mr. William Shakspeare or Mr. John Milton,) “at what period a man is born. A young man alive at this period hardly knows to what improvement of human life he has been introduced; and I would bring before his notice the changes which have taken place in England since I began to breathe the breath of life—a period amounting to seventy years. Gas was unknown. I groped about the streets of London in all but utter darkness of a twinkling oil lamp, under the protection of watchmen in their grand climacteric, and exposed to every species of degradation and insult. I have been nine hours in sailing from Dover to Calais, before the invention of steam. It took me nine hours to go from Taunton to Bath before the invention of railroads, and I now go in six hours from Taunton to London! In going from Taunton to Bath I suffered between ten thousand and twelve thousand severe contusions, before stone-breaking Macadam was born. I paid fifteen pounds in a single year for repairs of carriage-springs on the pavement of London, and I now glide without noise or fracture on wooden pavement. I can walk, by the assistance of the police, from one end of London to the other without molestation; or, if tired, get into a cheap and active cab, instead of those cottages on wheels which the hackney coaches were at the beginning of my life. Whatever miseries I suffered, there

was no post to whisk my complaints for a single penny to the remotest corners of the empire; and yet, in spite of all these privations, I lived on quietly, and am now ashamed that I was not more discontented, and utterly surprised that all these changes and inventions did not occur two centuries ago. I forgot to add that, as the basket of stagecoaches in which the luggage was then carried had no springs, your clothes were rubbed all to pieces; and that, even in the best society, one-third of the gentlemen at least were always drunk.”

And now, Gentle Reader, have we not kept both troth and tryste with you? We put it to you seriously, did you ever chance to read a more rambling volume than the one now presented to you? You may talk to a pleasant companion in your first or second class carriage without losing the thread of our argument; you may indulge in a comfortable nap without its being necessary for you to mark the page where you dropped off. It may be better to begin at the beginning, and read in ordinary fashion to the close. But it will not be much worse if you have a fancy for commencing with the end. In short, you cannot go wrong, so you do but read in a charitable spirit—not being extreme to mark the much which is amiss.