The development of the English Road up to the present turning-point in its history, following, as we have seen, the political story of the island, falls into five divisions. =A.=--First came the primitive trackways, the chief of which must have been artificially strengthened, and some of which may have been, in sections at least, true roads up to the Roman invasions. =B.=--Next came the Roman road system, which was presumably developed in the second century of our era. This is the framework of all that followed. All our roads from that date (eighteen hundred years ago) to modern times have sprung from and have grown in connection with this original set plan or framework. That is true, no doubt, of all western countries, but it is especially true of England. The English road system is the product in every age of the great Roman scheme, the relics of which are more marked in England than they are anywhere else in the world. This point is the master point of the whole story. It is a point upon which popular history has completely lost its way. Popular history represents the Roman occupation of this island as an accident, a sort of interlude between the native British period and a later and separate “English” period which arose upon the invasion of the country by German tribes from beyond the North Sea. That is not the history of England at all. The history of England is the history of a Roman province. [Illustration: THE EARLIEST ROAD] England began by being, like everything else in the North and West, barbaric. It was civilized from the Mediterranean and made a part of the Roman Empire--that is, of one common civilization--one great state stretching from the Grampians to the Euphrates, and from the Sahara to the North Sea. This civilizing imprint of the Roman Empire Britain has never lost. Our civilization fell into decay, as did that of the whole of the rest of Europe. The decay was not due to the pirate raids from North Germany and Holland any more than it was due to the raids of the Scottish Highlanders, which were just as frequent and violent, or the raids of Irish pirates from the west, which were at one moment so severe as to put up a separate realm on the west coast of this island. The history of England is continuous, and its foundation, from which we get all our institutions, more than half our language, all our ideas and religion and the rest of it, is in the 400 years of high civilization between the landing of the Roman armies and the breakdown of the imperial system in the West. The Roman Road is the true and only root of the road system of Britain. All our local roads can be found developing slowly from the Roman roads of the district which had preceded them, and it is nearly always possible to trace the causes which led to each particular local system. In each you find the Roman Road is the backbone of the affair, and the later local roads existing only as developments of and changes from this basic Roman plan.