"The road," Bushnell says, "is that physical sign or symbol by which you will best understand any age or people. If they have no roads, they are savages; for the road is the creation of man and a type of civilized society. If you wish to know whether society is stagnant, learning scholastic, religion a dead formality, you may learn something by going into universities and libraries, something also by the work that is doing on cathedrals and churches or in them, but quite as much by looking at the roads; for if there is any motion in society, the road, which is the symbol of motion, will indicate the fact." As roads are the symbols of progress, so, according to the philosophy of Carlyle, they should only be used by working and progressive people, as he asserts that the public highways ought not to be occupied by people demonstrating that motion is impossible. Hence, when we trace back the history of the race to the dawn of civilization, we find that the first sponsors of art and science, commerce and manufacture, education and government, were the builders and supporters of public highways. The two most ancient civilizations situated in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates were connected by a commercial and military highway leading from Babylon to Memphis, along which passed the war chariots and the armies of the great chieftains and military kings of ancient days, and over which were carried the gems, the gold, the spices, the ivories, the textile fabrics, and all the curious and unrivalled productions of the luxurious Orient. On the line of this roadway arose Nineveh, Palmyra, Damascus, Tyre, Antioch, and other great commercial cities. On the southern shores of the Mediterranean the Carthaginians built up and consolidated an empire so prominent in military and naval achievements and in the arts and industries of civilized life, that for four hundred years it was able to hold its own against the preponderance of Greece and Rome; and as might have been expected, they were systematic and scientific road-makers from whom the Romans learned the art of road-building.