As in the metropolis, so in the provinces. The roads, both in the towns and outside them, were in many cases as bad as bad could be. Their not unusual condition was that of “a narrow hollow way, little wider than a ditch, barely allowing of the passage of a vehicle drawn by horses in a single line.” This deep, narrow road was flanked by an elevated causeway, covered with flags or boulder stones, along which the traffic of the locality was carried on the backs of single horses, so that “it is difficult to imagine the delay, the toil, and the perils by which the conduct of the traffic was attended.” Under these circumstances, “there were towns, even in the same county, more widely separated for all practical purposes than London and Glasgow in the present day.”[9] Business was done slowly, and involved so great an expenditure of time and trouble that prices were necessarily high. News travelled more slowly still, and it was sometimes months before the people who lived at the extremities of the island knew what had happened in the metropolis. The reader who desires to obtain a graphic and eloquent account of the circumstances of England previous to the canal era could not do better than consult Macaulay, who, in the famous third chapter of his ‘History,’ has devoted a considerable amount of space to the consideration of the social and economic changes that had come over the country since 1685. The description given of the condition of the people in that year might almost be literally applied to their condition in the middle of the eighteenth century. The population had increased, it is true, and commerce had been developed in the interval. But the facilities for rapid and economical transportation had not been materially altered for the better. The great mass of the people were as ignorant, as superstitious, as shiftless as in the seventeenth century. Their sanitary surroundings were as unwholesome, their industrial pursuits as improvident, their habits as deplorable, their hardships as irksome, their discomforts and inconveniences as tiresome. From this remarkable record of the days of our forefathers we quote the following passages as being specially germane to the subject under consideration:—