Off the main routes, roads degenerated into corduroy roads, and these into tracks, and even "blazed trails "; while, as for bridges, cases were known where the want of them had kept settlers who were living within three miles of a principal town, from communicating with it for days at a time.[7] And, as the roads grew rougher, Canadian conditions seemed to the stranger to assert themselves more and more offensively, animate and inanimate nature thrusting man back on the bare elements of things. The early descriptions of the colony are crowded with pictures of wretched immigrants, mosquito-bitten, or, in winter, half dead with cold, struggling through mud and swamp, to find the land whither they had come to evade the miseries of civilization, confronting them with the squalor and pains of nature. Far into the Victorian era Canada, whether French or British, was a dislocated community, with settlements set apart from each other as much by mud, swamp, and wood-land, as by distance. Her population, more particularly in the west, was engaged not with political ideals, but in an incessant struggle {13} with the forests; and the little jobs, which enabled the infant community to build a bridge or repair a road at the public expense, must naturally have seemed to the electors more important items of a political programme than responsible government or abolition of the clergy reserves. No doubt, in the older towns and cities, the efforts of the earlier settlers had gained for their sons leisure and a chance of culture; yet even in Toronto, the wild lands were but a few miles distant, and, as Richardson saw it, London was "literally a city of stumps, many of the houses being still surrounded by them."