There has been a great deal of exaggeration in this matter. Sundry historians have written as though wheeled traffic were unknown until very modern times. That, of course, is nonsense. But the distinctive mark of the later seventeenth century and early eighteenth was the gradual substitution of ordinary passenger traffic by wheel instead of on horseback. The public vehicle comes in much at the same time as the private vehicle, developed by the new great landlord class for their convenience in their country rounds. As has been the case with the internal combustion engine in our own time, the instrument preceded the change in the road. As wheeled traffic for passengers becomes more common you get increasing complaints on the condition of the roads and increasing motive for improving them, and out of that grows the _turnpike system_, which, with its later development, has carried us on to the present day. [Illustration: TOLL HOUSE ON THE BATH ROAD] ii THE TURNPIKE SYSTEM, by a process which originated in small beginnings and ended with a revolution in general communications, made the modern English Road. It sprang from that character in the economic society of Britain (closely connected with the new aristocratic government of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) whereby, in the destruction of the monarchy, individual action became supreme. The same force which had forbidden great national roads to rise, to wit, the absence of a central all-powerful authority (such as was the French monarchy just over the Channel, with its great roads planned and constructed throughout the whole realm on one model)--which had maintained local diversity and local usage and kept back the proper development of the road--made for a change which should be due to private enterprise. We all know of what value this individualist and aristocratic economic system was to the expansion of English trade overseas, and how it is at the foundation of what is to-day called “the Empire.” In domestic affairs it meant, of course, the sacrifice of the interests of the community to a comparatively small wealthy class, but that did not prevent this wealthy class from acting very efficiently under the opportunity for gain within its own sphere. The mass of Englishmen became, and have remained, impoverished, but the total wealth of the country and its population have vastly increased.