The Sun.
London, England, 1862-02-15 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, SATURDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 15, 1862.

were wise they would leave no part of their estates
and farms inacessible, or with difficulty accessible,
for want of the means of easy communication with

:he rest of the country.

Since the multiplication of railways the necessity
for perfecting the local routes of communication has
been increased ten-fold. We are taken so easily to

every part of the country, that it is above all things
unendurable, when you have sped your way with-
out trouble one or two hundred miles, to find a few
miles off the railway, that you are fairly brought

up by the impossibility of getting the local con-
veyances across a few miles of country in much less

time than you have spent in your railway trip.

We are likely now to escape the misery of taking
more time to get to Paddington, or perhaps to the
Great Northern Station, from London Bridge than
it took us to ride from Brighton, and we must

have a parallel improvement in the mud, and sand,
and deep rut roads, if they deserve to be called
roads, which lie not far from railways

in many parts of the country. When, how-
ever, the distance to a railway station
is considerable, the necessity for improving the
local communication is, if anything, greater. People
might almost as well emigrate to New Zealand as
live twenty or thirty miles from a railway, with
bad roads to that grand link with the civilised
world. _ _

Now we find it estimated that about one-third o
the highways of England are very much in the
position of the heath roads of our boyish recollec-
tions. They lie as an obstruction between the one-
third of highways in excellent repair and the one-
third in moderately good repair ; and the cause of
this is confessed to be two-fold. First, that each
parish is its own road-maker, next, as each parish
does not furnish a man skilled in road-making, or
caring much about road-making, the parish road
is, in too many instances, left to take its chance.
It did very well for our grandfathers and great-
grandfathers, why should it not do for us.
The principles of the bill then, if we understand
it, are first to preserve representation of the tax-
payers, that being an essentially English principle.
But, secondly, to combine the parishes into dis-
tricts, which shall chose their way-wardens to have
charge of the highways. It will thus become im-
possible for one lazy lag-behind parish to make
itself an obstruction to the intercourse of parishes
on either side by allowing its roads to remain in
such a state, that passengers, who can do it, go miles
out of their way to avoid them. The charge of
centralisation is very unjustly brought against such
Unions. The truth is that where facilities
of intercourse are what they ought to be,
the area of easy co-operative action is very
much enlarged. Inhabitants become neighbours
by means of railways, telegraphs, bridges,
good roads and penny postage, who had, many
years ago, scarcely any acquaintance with each
other. The old parish system will indeed be a long
time before it gives way to anything like parochial
districts. Its memories are too long for that, both
socially and legally. Still the parochial system
must be modified in many things by those condi-
tions which during the last five and twenty years
have so completely modified the social relations
of time and space.
The other principle of the bill, that it shall be the
business of some responsible and competent person'
to see to theroads of the district, is the only one on
which reliance can be placed for having the work
well and cheaply done. It is but the universal
principle of all good management, whether national
or local, or commercial, and we should ex-
pect the best results from it. The present
parish surveyors are practically irresponsi-
ble. They may care about their duties, or
they may not. They generally allow *he farmers
to suit their own convenience to an extent which
is ruinous to the highways. Under the propose d
arrangement probably a fair rate would be paid
by all, and such farmers as pleased would receive
back of it what they could earn by proper em-
ployment of their teams at the times advantageous
to the roads. It is certain in any case that the
landlords and farmers would be among the
first to reap the benefit of the improved
means of traffic in agricultural districts, and that
they will eventually be thankful that the public
convenience coerced them to promote their own

advantage.
We trust the bill is now safe. A majority of 141
to 30 in a house of Landlords ought to put that be-
yond doubt. Mr. HENLEY'S scruples, illustrated
so amusingly, seem to have been satisfied by Sir
GEORGE GREY. Indeed, they all related merely to
details easy to arrange in committee. If this is to
be a session of useful, but non-political measures,
we have no doubt that this Highway Bill, When the
details have been well considered, will, more than
most, deserve the former title. A combination of
parishes will be worth a paid surveyor's time, and
the extent of the area, and the slight difference
to the rate of keeping all the roads equally good,
will prevent the ratepayers from grumbling, ac-
cording to the reputed wont of JOHN BULL. In-
deed, the probability is that each parish of the
combination, when it pays to a joint rate, will be
rather disposed to grumble if its own share of the
roads be not kept in thoroughly good repair.

S hips, Commerce, and Colonies used to be in-
scribed upon our banners as words peculiarly sym-
bolical at once of our strength and of our greatness.
The Regius Professor of Modern History at the
University of Oxford, with a very select few who
may possibly think with him, would have us erase
one of these words, with all convenient despatch,
and let the inscription run henceforth simply,
Ships and Commerce. Yet, at the very period when
this extraordinary proposition is advanced, our
colonies never were more flourishing, never were
more intimately bound up with the old mother
country, in all their interests, by those interwoven
ties of patriotism and loyalty, that are in themselves
and in their significance all but identical. It
is a happy augury that it should be thus with
our colonies, in truth, at an era in the develop-
ment of modern civilisation when the ends of the
earth are being fast brought together by the won-
drous agency of the electric telegraph. Once let
the globe be girdled by a continuous chain of sub-
marine cables and overland telegraph wires, and
London and Sydney—Pekin and Washington—
Cape Town and Terra del Fuego could be brought
into instantaneous communication. The Imperial
Government of England might then—as the result
we are referring to is one, the advent of which is in
all human likelihood simply a mere question of
time, we may say rather— will then be able
to transmit its instructions and advices
as
rapidly to Hindostan and New Zealand, to
Jamaica and Vancouver's Island, to Gibraltar
and St. Helena as to the War Office in Pall Mall,
or, as used to be done, until a year or two since,
to the India House in Leadenhall-street. The
' network of telegraph wires and submarine cables
we know, for certain, is already weaving. We are
not here writing, consequently, of mere idle day
dreams. We are simply discussing the wider and
wider development of what is already growing
with visible rapidity. The trail of the lightning
messenger from shore to shore is being carried day
by day, further and further along the primeval bed
I of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and will, at