Now, the trouble here is a purely economic trouble. Urban sites have a special value, even in the outskirts. They are not, as a rule, sites to which anyone is attached, but the cost of buying them up has made reformers hesitate to drive the arterial ways which are so urgently needed. Once your great road has reached the inner ring of a large town its traffic disperses and there is no need for continuing its dimensions. But the new system can be of no real service if, on the approach to a great town, we retain the narrows and guts which disfigure, for example, the western road out of London. It might even be said that from the political standpoint it would be better to begin with the assurance of good exits and entrances than with the planning of the Road as a whole. At present we have, in the particular case of London, one, and only one, good entry. That is the entry from the north-west. All the others are hopelessly congested. iv There will occur in connection with all this discussion of the necessity for a modern change in the Road the point of ways and means. Somebody must pay. How shall the payment be made? It has already become a matter of politics. Pretty well all that can be said upon it has been said, but as yet there is no agreement. I would maintain (very tentatively, hardly as more than a suggestion) that we shall never get a satisfactory settlement until we found ourselves upon three main principles: (1) The making of a few great arteries, coupled with the making of proper exits from the great towns and of by-ways round the urban centres, is a national concern. You cannot, in the present state of society, regard it as local, nor even as chiefly concerning the direct users of the Road, for even these, who are apparently the people upon whom the burden should most justly fall, develop by their travel the district through which they pass. I suggest, therefore, that you must start in this case with the fundamental principle of a national fund, and a national fund not proceeding from ear-marked receipts alone, but also drawn from general taxes. (2) The second principle which I should suggest is that in so far as you tax travel for the purposes of this fund you should tax it not by any complicated combination of weight, power, fuel, and so forth, but through some one factor alone, otherwise you will be perpetually remodelling your scheme and as perpetually causing a grievance.