Amid the doubts and difficulties that trouble this meditation on strife, just a few things are bright and clear-eyed, like illumined windows which on dark nights cause jaded tramps to feel less their lone wayfaring; and these things I have watched for years in the life of bridges, where their activity never ceases. It is clear enough, for instance, that custom and convention have acted as narcotics on the mind, sending reason to sleep. This explains why human strife has never turned to the best use the great opportunities that each generation has inherited. To custom and convention, mankind has owed the social rule which has sown the seed of death in every civilization; the rule of illogic and discord, “Each for All, yet Each for Himself.” Let us see this rule in operation on the highways, taking care to note how it has inflamed egotism and deadened both the sense of honour and the spirit of citizenship. The just and beautiful principle that every man lives by his mother the State, and that he must do good for the benefit of the commonweal, was enforced upon mediæval landowners by the _trinoda necessitas_, or triple obligation, which among other duties made the upkeep of roads and bridges a general charge on all owners of the English soil. Not even the religious houses were exempted, though the State favoured them in other ways. But the second principle of the social rule--“Each for Himself”--interfered constantly with the first principle, bringing trouble after trouble into the administration of the highways, as into all other useful and necessary things. Landowners transferred their duties to their tenants, and very often the tenants made negligence a habit, until at last the Law and the Church became equally active for the people’s benefit. Again and again bishops offered “forty days’ indulgence to all who would draw from the treasure that God had given them valuable and charitable aid towards the building and repair” of a poor bridge ruined by neglect, or of some quagmire which had been a decent road.[12] It happened in the year 1318 that the Law pottered into action because a timber bridge at Old Shoreham, in Sussex, had been scandalously ill-used by those who were responsible for its upkeep. Half of it had fallen into the river. Year after year an evident crime against the State had gone on publicly, yet no one had taken steps to make the dangerous condition of the bridge a subject for legal enquiry and punishment. The village grumbled, of course, but grumblers have never had any initiative of their own; unless a man of action has come to be their conscience and their leader, they have done nothing. Their energy has evaporated in talk, like steam from a boiling pan. It was not until the bridge had fallen that the village hummed intelligently like a hive of bees, and set itself to work. What could be done then? Who was the landowner? No less a person than the Archbishop of Canterbury. Are we then to believe that in 1318