The new roads, bridges, and other improvements suggested by the engineer, excited much interest in the north. The Highland Society voted him their thanks by acclamation; the counties of Inverness and Ross followed; and he had letters of thanks and congratulation from many of the Highland chiefs. "If they will persevere," says he, "with anything like their present zeal, they will have the satisfaction of greatly improving a country that has been too long neglected. Things are greatly changed now in the Highlands. Even were the chiefs to quarrel, de'il a Highlandman would stir for them. The lairds have transferred their affections from their people to flocks of sheep, and the people have lost their veneration for the lairds. It seems to be the natural progress of society; but it is not an altogether satisfactory change. There were some fine features in the former patriarchal state of society; but now clanship is gone, and chiefs and people are hastening into the opposite extreme. This seems to me to be quite wrong."*[10] In the same year, Telford was elected a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, on which occasion he was proposed and supported by three professors; so that the former Edinburgh mason was rising in the world and receiving due honour in his own country. The effect of his report was such, that in the session of 1803 a Parliamentary Commission was appointed, under whose direction a series of practical improvements was commenced, which issued in the construction of not less than 920 additional miles of roads and bridges throughout the Highlands, one-half of the cost of which was defrayed by the Government and the other half by local assessment. But in addition to these main lines of communication, numberless county roads were formed by statute labour, under local road Acts and by other means; the land-owners of Sutherland alone constructing nearly 300 miles of district roads at their own cost. [Image] Map of Telford's Roads. By the end of the session of 1803, Telford received his instructions from Mr. Vansittart as to the working survey he was forthwith required to enter upon, with a view to commencing practical operations; and he again proceeded to the Highlands to lay out the roads and plan the bridges which were most urgently needed. The district of the Solway was, at his representation, included, with the object of improving the road from Carlisle to Portpatrick--the nearest point at which Great Britain meets the Irish coast, and where the sea passage forms only a sort of wide ferry.