The idea of the turnpike was to give a small body of capitalists the right to exploit certain sections of road. They would improve the surface and broaden the gauge where necessary, etc., but they would put up gates where they could charge for the passage of all and sundry and thus earn the interest upon their money. They had also powers to borrow. They had certain powers for using the public rates, etc., and in general, through this system, the roads of the country were more and more given over to what we call to-day capitalist exploitation: for although very often the sections of road thus exploited were short they formed an interruption to general travel. Popular resentment against such an innovation was, of course, bitter, especially when it extended to large areas. There were periods of riot in which the toll-gates were destroyed, and there was something like a little civil war in the matter in South Wales, but the interests of the wealthier class were supreme, the populace was suppressed, and the system continued. It also vastly extended. While it had the social disadvantages just mentioned, it had the economic advantage of creating bit by bit longer and longer sections of really good road up and down the country. To the turnpike system we owe that development of the English roads which made English coaching and gave us, in the generation before and during the Napoleonic wars, on the whole, the best system of local communications in Europe, though we still grievously lacked _continuous_ national communications between distant centres. iii The date to which must be referred the great change in this respect--the date from which we must count the growth of general national communications continuous throughout the island--is the year 1810. The turnpike system did indeed die slowly and only much later. It lingered on to well within living memory, and those who are curious to watch the rise and decay of institutions may even argue that some relics of it remain among us still. But in practice 1810 is the date of the first experimental change which was ultimately to produce the road system of to-day.