How strong the influence is you may observe in one particular historical example where its influence is more clearly discovered than in any other--that is, the example of the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666. Here was the finest opportunity for rebuilding that ever a Government had. It might have done what was done at Turin and laid out a new city altogether. Two men of genius, Sir William Temple and Sir Christopher Wren, produced magnificent plans with broad ways, round places for the crossings, and a carefully thought-out scheme of transverse streets. Vested interest and economic peril proved too strong for them. The city was rebuilt on its old lines with narrow lanes and alleys, courts, tortuous trace, the mark of all which it carries to-day. There is a good side to this, of course. No one can regret the conservation of tradition. Everyone who knew the old Paris mourned for the antiquity which was swept away under Napoleon III, and even in our slight changes in modern London we are shocked at the desecration they involve. I confess that I myself have never got over the loss of Temple Bar, though I only knew it as a child. If this were the main motive at work one would criticize less strongly the hesitation to make our town streets meet the modern great change. But it is _not_ the main motive. The main motive is a blunder in the science of economics. It is the idea that the destruction of a number of imaginary economic values (“imaginary” because they form no part of the total real wealth of the State), to wit, the urban site values, is in some way an expenditure of real wealth. So far is this from being the case that there is perhaps no example in all history of a congested street-system being reformed without the wealth of the city increasing after the change. Of the minor political questions which confront us to-day in England this stands in the first rank. If we do not reform our main roads we shall handicap ourselves against our competitors, but if we do not broaden and change our town streets we may rapidly strangle and atrophy our most vital centres of commerce. ii The effect of the second point, legal restraint in modifying the line of least resistance, will be found under two forms: the first is negative; the lack of public powers of coercion for the acquirement of land by which a road should pass. The second is positive; legal restraint against the road through ownership or privilege.