Transport and communication by land and water have thus become what Prof. J. Shield Nicholson rightly calls, in his "Principles of Political Economy," "the bases of industrial organisation"; and it is to industrial organisation that a country such as ours has been indebted in a pre-eminent degree both for its material prosperity and for the position it occupies to-day among the nations of the world. But just as British engineers long regarded the subject of road construction and road repairs as beneath their notice, and left such work to be done by any parish "surveyor," subsidised pauper or "Blind Jack of Knaresboro'," who thought fit to engage in it, so have most writers of history, while zealously recording the actions of kings, of diplomatists, of politicians, and of warriors who may have made a great stir in their day but who took only a very {3}small share in the real and permanent progress of the British people, bestowed only a passing reference--and sometimes not even that--on questions of trade and transport which have played a far more important part in our social and national advancement. The history of railways has already been told by various writers. But the history of railways is only the last chapter in the history of inland transport and communication; and, though that last chapter is of paramount importance, and will here receive full recognition, it is essential that those who would form a clear idea of the position as a whole should begin the story at the beginning, and trace the course of events leading up to the conditions as they exist to-day. {4}CHAPTER II BRITAIN'S EARLIEST ROADS It has been assumed in some quarters that, because the main routes of travel in this country did not have to pass over lofty mountains, as in Austria and Switzerland, therefore the construction of roads here was, or should have been, a comparatively easy matter. But this is far from having been the case, the earliest opening of regular lines of communication by road having been materially influenced by certain physical conditions of the land itself.