“THOMAS SMITH, the OLD LEWES CARRIER, being dead, THE BUSINESS IS NOW CONTINUED BY HIS WIDOW, MARY SMITH, who gets into the ‘George Inn,’ in the Borough, Southwark, EVERY WEDNESDAY in the afternoon, and sets out for Lewes EVERY THURSDAY morning by eight o’clock, and brings Goods and Passengers to Lewes, Fletching, Chayley, Newick, and all places adjacent at reasonable rates. Performed (_if God permit_) by MARY SMITH.” No mention yet, it will be observed, of Brighton, that little fisher-village of Brighthelmstone which presently was to rival fashionable Bath. The waggon went no farther than Lewes; and the first public conveyance to Brighton appears to have been the “Brighthelmstone Stage” of May 1756, running as an extension of the “London and Lewes One-Day Stage.” Speed was by no means sought upon these old waggon-journeys. Quite apart from their usual inability to go, under the most favourable circumstances, at more than about four miles an hour, they were exempt from passenger-duty, on all travellers carried, only when the rate of progression did not exceed that speed. Thus, although the Brighton waggon owned by Tubb and Davis in 1770 had a rival conveyance put on the road in 1776 by Lashmar & Co., both continued at the old pace. Both went by way of East Grinstead and Lewes, and took three days to perform the fifty-eight miles, Lashmar’s waggon leaving the “King’s Head,” Southwark, every Tuesday at 3 a.m., and arriving at the “King’s Head,” Brighton, on Thursday afternoons. Goods and parcels were carried at the rates of 2s. 6d. and 3s. per cwt. Malachy Postlethwayt’s _Dictionary of Trade_, a work published in 1751, gives some eloquent details on this subject of the carriage of goods. Comparing that year, when turnpikes had improved the roads, with the bad ways of thirty or forty years earlier, it is stated that where six horses could in former times scarcely draw 30 cwt. sixty miles, they could then draw 50 or 60 cwt. Carriage, too, was cheaper by 30 per cent. than before. In 1750 there were from twenty-five to thirty waggons sent weekly from Birmingham to London, carrying goods at from £3 to £4 a ton; thirty years earlier the cost had been £7 a ton. Between Portsmouth and London freights had fallen from £7 to £4 or £5; and between Exeter and London and other towns in the west of like distance from £12 to £8. Postlethwayt cited these figures with pride, but he argued that the heavy waggons wore out the roads, and that they did not pay sufficient toll. The manufacturers, he thought, got too much advantage out of these low freights, and although the public thereby could purchase goods more cheaply, they paid their savings all out again in the heavy repairs of the highway and the consequent extravagant highway rates rendered necessary. Railway rates, we may here remark, are a source of much bitter discussion to-day, but they are fifteen times less than the reduced rates of 1750.