About one hundred and thirty years ago there seems to have arisen an extraordinary contest between the owners of waggons and those who repaired the highways. It was asserted that the waggon wheels destroyed the road by reason of the great weight of the vehicles and the narrowness of the tyres. The question was carried before Parliament, and endeavours were made to widen the tyres to nine and even ten inches, so as to reduce the crushing effect of the wheels on soft roads to a minimum. On such roads it was said there were ruts more than a foot deep, cut by the narrow wheels. The Legislature endeavoured to promote the use of broad wheels by exemptions from turnpike tolls, by restrictions and fines upon narrow wheels, and actually recommended tyres 16 inches wide, under the idea that they would roll roads flat, just as gravel walks in a garden are rolled. In the British Museum is a work by Daniel Bourne, dated 1763, having a design of a waggon with four wheels in which the front axle-tree is very short, so that the track outside the front wheels is made to correspond with the inside of the hind wheels, and they are made like four garden rollers, each 15 inches wide, so that as the waggon moved 5 feet of the road should be simultaneously rolled flat. After a contest of many years it was generally acknowledged that, to oblige waggoners to carry burdensome wheels to roll the road for pleasure carriages, was an obvious hardship. Every inch added to the really necessary width for strength to the tyre of the wheels was felt by the carrier as a grievance, and the evasion of the government regulations was sympathised with by the common sense of mankind. It was left to the waggoner to keep the wheel sufficiently narrow to run lightly, and sufficiently wide to prevent its sinking with a heavy load into the road. It was admitted that the chief person interested in the matter was the waggoner, as, if his wheels turned heavily over the road by reason of sinking into the surface, then he would fine himself by being obliged to use more horses, or by travelling very slowly. During the whole of the sixteenth century the improvement of English main and cross-roads continued steadily advancing by the system of turnpike tolls, on the security of which money was borrowed by the parishes in order to make them. Although for a long time there was great opposition, yet the system suited the time, and was probably, in our free country, the only way to obtain them. In France, on the other hand, the nobility made their roads by the forced labour of the peasants within their territory--one of the instances of cruel oppression that led to the outbreak of the French Revolution of 1786, as the poor peasants were obliged, from time to time, to leave the cultivation of the fields and turn out with carts and horses to labour for two or three weeks together at the repair of the roads, and this, too, without any payment.