Here the scheme is contradicted at every point. A long stretch dead straight is very rare: when it is found it is due to some accident of local choice. The surface differs not as between the main road and local road, but indiscriminately: a small parish way will often have a better surface than the main road it joins. The gauge is haphazard: the main road between the capital and some great port will go through the most surprising changes in breadth, here appearing as the narrow high street of a suburb, and there, a few miles on, spreading to 50 feet upon an open heath, then again turning abruptly round the sharp right-angle corners and between the irregular frontages of a village. The English roads are far more numerous, the mileage of good road surface to the hundred square miles far greater, than abroad. Yet not one of them is planned throughout. They all twist, the lesser ones winding perpetually and usually without any reason of their own, compelled to such anomalies by the custom of older paths, by enclosures, by encroachments. For the most part these roads, from the most important to the least, are “blind,” that is, bounded by obstacles which mask the approach of corners and conceal the country on either side: a very pronounced national characteristic, due mainly to the use of hedges upon the more fertile land. The grading is never continuous--the main roads in which this feature has been most thoroughly looked to yet have astonishing exceptions of 1 in 9, 1 in 8. The bridges are of varying strength, half of them bearing warnings that they are dangerous to heavy vehicles. When we seek the origin of this strange mixture of serviceable and unserviceable in the English road system we discover it in the political history of the country. The English hedged roads yield their more pleasing landscape, they have more length to the square mile than those abroad, they are haphazard in gauge and gradient (only half planned), they have such excellent surface (and that independently of their importance), such a strange assortment of bridges, such abrupt and blind corners--all because the Road, like every other institution, is a function of society, and because English society proceeded on special political lines of its own after the Reformation. Like the road systems of every other country, that of England arose from the great Roman military ways. It went through exactly the same phases of decline as those of the neighbouring Continent, it had the same new development in the Middle Ages, it ran through open fields mainly. A man put down on an English road of Henry VIII or Elizabeth’s day would have marked no great distinction between its character and those of a Flanders or a Breton or a Provençal road, or the roads of the Rhine.