A last minor effect of the Road upon human society is the use of the Road as a _boundary_. That is a use, of course, which hardly ever develops in a high civilization. On the contrary, a road of its nature should run _transverse_ to boundaries. It is built to unite towns the territories of which have boundaries naturally perpendicular to the Road. The road from Canterbury to London, for instance (the first great main road in this island), is transverse to the Darent frontier, and all the great roads from the French-speaking to the German-speaking country on this side of the Rhine are transverse to the language boundary. It is in the very function of a road to be thus transverse to political limits. But with the decay of civilization the remains of a great, well-built road lend themselves at once to the idea of a boundary. Men need something to which they can perpetually refer which will be a permanent mark and which will be indisputable. A river is thus often so chosen; sometimes, but much more rarely, a range of hills, especially where the crest is particularly steep and marked. But the Road, when the use of documents declines and when record is with difficulty maintained--the Road, especially if it has been built to endure, comes in to fulfil this artificial function. Here in England we have more examples of this than in any other part of Europe. Very often you can recover a Roman road first by noting on the map the parish boundaries running on straight lines, which are the prolongation one of the other, and the survival of a Roman road used in the Dark Ages to define a parochial limit. The Road is thus also used as a boundary not only for parishes but for states, not only for states but for realms. The Roman road to the north-west of London was part of the great boundary established between Wessex and the Danish territories of the north and east. One could quote hundreds of cases with a little research, but best of all perhaps is that of the boundary of Westminster, which dates from the heart of the Dark Ages. The northern limit of the manor was fixed by the great Roman military road which to this day survives and is the boundary of Hyde Park on the north. * * * * * THE ROAD § II THE ENGLISH ROAD CHAPTER VII THE ROAD IN HISTORY _Through the Dim Ages: The Characteristics of the English Road: Absence of Plan: A Local instead of a National System Leading to the Present Crisis._ i The general theory of the Road having been discussed, we may next turn to the particular case of THE ENGLISH ROAD, my second and concluding section. The English Road has, as we shall see, highly-marked characteristics of its own which are of immediate concern to us at this revolutionary moment in the economic history of the State.