That these conditions had been greatly prejudiced by the bad roads is beyond all question. Villages which could be reached only with difficulty in summer, and were isolated from the rest of the world for four or five months in the autumn, winter and early spring, were steeped in ignorance and superstition. True it is that in such communities as these the games, sports, customs and traditions which represented the poetry of old English life survived the longest, and have not even yet disappeared before the march of Modern Progress. But no less {93}true is it that such communities were the longest to foster that once popular belief in witchcraft which meant, not merely the looking askance at any decrepit old creature who was believed to have turned the milk sour in the pails, or to have stopped the cows and ewes from breeding, but the putting to death of many thousands of supposed "witches" in England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The total number of victims in the first eighty years of the seventeenth century alone is estimated by Dr Charles Mackay, in "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions," at forty thousand! This particular mania was certainly shared by Kings, Parliaments and ecclesiastics no less than by ignorant villagers; but it decreased in proportion as general intelligence increased, and the increase in general intelligence was materially influenced by those improvements in locomotion and communication which led to wider knowledge and a greater intermingling of the classes. The same isolation fostered the belief in ghosts, goblins, wraiths, kelpies and other inhabitants of the world of spirits, whose visitations or doings probably formed a leading topic of conversation as the isolated family sat round the fire in the long winter months, wives and daughters busy, no doubt, with their distaffs, their spinning-wheel or their needlework, but none the less able to tell or to listen to the favourite stories. The whole conditions of existence were of the most circumscribed kind. Many a village got no news at all of what was happening in the world except such as the pedlar might bring, or, alternatively, might circulate through his London-printed "broadsides," telling of some great victory, giving the last dying speech of a noted highwayman, or recording the death of one ruler and the succession of another, of which events the villagers might not hear for two or even three months after they had occurred. "Whole generations," in the words of Samuel Smiles ("Early Roads and Modes of Travelling"), "lived a monotonous, ignorant, prejudiced and humdrum life. They had no enterprise, no energy, little industry, and were content to die where they were born."