The roads of Britain, as it appears to us, ought to be placed on a system of formation and management different from the present. National roads ought to be under the immediate control of government, county roads under the control of counties, and parish roads under the control of parishes. There ought to be one general law applicable to all these roads, determining the maximum degree of slope, their width, and compelling guide-posts to be set up at all junctions or intersections of roads; proper milestones; lamps on the national roads; and giving a power over the surface to a certain extent on each side of the road, so that the hedges and trees bordering it should be kept in a proper state. Government ought to have its board of engineers, and each county and each parish its engineer. Improved lines of road ought to be determined on and laid down in maps; such roads to be executed by degrees as wanted, or during a scarcity of employment for the labouring classes, and to be paid for by parish, county, or national rates, according as they were done for the parish, county, or nation. By having this reserve of the commonest description of labour always ready for the working classes, there could never be any great distress among them; while no money would ever be paid to the able-bodied poor without an equivalent being obtained for it, and the country would be gradually provided, as its wants required, with the very best description of roads (It appears to us to be one of the first duties of every government to provide the means of subsistence for all the governed: either this is the case, or the government of a country becomes reduced to a mere system of police, whose sole office is to protect the governed from one another, and from foreign aggression. Good roads and safe harbours form the most valuable capital of a country; and so long as these admit of improvement in a fertile country like Britain, it appears to us that the population can never be considered as superfluous, because they may always be beneficially employed.). After such a system as that above-mentioned had been in operation for a few years, hilly tracts, and those remote parts of the country which have now the very worst roads, would have roads as even as those in any gentleman's park, and more delightfully varied. For want of some general system of this kind, much of the money expended during the last twenty years on roads may be considered as little better than thrown away; because an improved system of roadmaking would change many of the lines of direction. It is difficult to estimate the immense benefit which would accrue to a country from having in every part of it level roads, or the nearest approach to them that art could make, formed on the best principles, and kept in the best state of repair. In the most hilly parts of the island, a man who now keeps one horse would immediately be rendered equal, in point of the means of conveyance for either pleasure or profit, to one who now keeps four.
