Memorandum on Roads.

A Fragment.

The subject of roads might be considered under the following heads:—

1.	What a road is; the term defined. Of the several kinds of vehicles used on roads.
2.	Of the economical causes of the formation of roads, and of their uses. Man can create nothing, can only change the place of matter. Safety (as an investment) of roads, and their lastingness.
3.	Road-making scientifically considered-Different kinds of roads. Roads of the ancients.
4.	Of the funds for road-making and maintenance, and of the most equitable mode of raising and administering them. The past and present means.
5.	The legislation of different countries on the subject of roads.page 198
6.	The results on man of roads, socially and politically considered. They produce both love and wealth. Observations on human progress.

A road may be called a piece of ground over which men, animals, and commodities move or are moved. It may be a bridge, viaduct, or tunnel. A road also, from a failing too common in our language, means a secure piece of water in which ships may lie at anchor.

The word road has evidently its origin in the word ridan, preterite rad to ride on horseback; and would thus mean a party of riders. Afterwards it seems to have been synonymous with raid and inroad, which is a sudden riding into a territory by what the Saxons called rad, or radhere, i.e. cavalry. In our time the meaning is transferred from the men to the place of action.

The oldest and most proper word for what is now called a road was way, a place for walking on. Its derivation was also Saxon, being waeg, a way. When the way was required to be made over very flat or wet ground, it was raised by means of soil got from parallel ditches or elsewhere, and was then called, rightly enough, a highway. Path is also Anglo-Saxon, and the old paad, paeth, or path, meaning a track for foot passengers, and narrower than those for animals.

The word street is from the Latin stratum, and thus refers to the laying or strewing of the stones on the road, i.e. by paving. The ancient roads of Rome had sometimes several pavements on them, the one over the other, and amounting in all to many feet in thickness. These were the strata of the via—of the way.

Glancing at the different means and degrees in which roads may be utilised for the carriage of goods, we may mention them in their order, beginning with the lowest and most laborious:—the human back or head; man with wheel-barrow or hand-cart; animal and pack; animal and sledge; animal and hod-cart; animal and cart, or waggon; animal, cart, and macadamised road; animal, cart, and paved road; animal, cart, and tramway; railway. The macadamised road is in our time dominant, and is the most generally useful, but a clay road and narrow tramway might, under certain circumstances, be a substitute.

Sledge is from the Saxon slidan to slide, and is familiar to everyone. The hod-cart was a sledge, but with shafts attached, the animal carrying in part and drawing in part the load laid on it. The cart was made for carrying, and with two wheels, and which were formed at first from the trunks of trees sawn across. The dray, from the Saxon dragan to drag or page 200 draw, was the English word for cart. The waggon, or Saxon wain, was a way-going thing on four wheels and still common.

Those who use-roads should be rated for them.

At the first formation of, or after a very fundamental improvement in, a road, people should be rated according to the addition which such road makes to the value of their life and wealth; of their wealth, not in land only, but to other forms as well.

Users of the road should pay according to the damage they do to it, and the expense to repair such damage.

There should therefore be a general rate payable by everyone in the country, as was formerly the case, (sailors who went on foreign voyages, being alone excepted), and a special rate laid perhaps on land as now. In the older settled districts of this Colony, and where new roads are not likely to be made, a tax on the number of work horses on the farm, as indicating the use made of the road, would be fairer perhaps than the present system of annual value.