the right lines and colossal structure of the Roman Viae and the modern
Railroad. We have indeed arrived at a very similar epoch of civilization
to that of the Caesarian era, but with adjuncts derived from a purer
religion, and from more generous and expanded views of commerce and the
interdependence of nations, than were vouchsafed by Providence to the
ancient world.

* * * * *

Roads being so essential a feature of all political communities, it might
have been expected that if no other feature of Roman cultivation had
survived the wreck of the Empire, the great arteries of intercourse would
at least have been retained. But the works of man's hand are the
exponent of his ideas; and the ideas of the Teutonic and Celtic races who
divided among themselves the patrimony of the Caesars were essentially
different from those entertained and embodied by Greece and Rome. The
State ceased to be an organic and self-attracting body. The individual
rather than the corporate existence of man became the prevalent
conception of the Church and of legislators; and nations sought rather to
isolate themselves from one another, than to coalesce and correspond.
Moreover, the life of antiquity was eminently municipal. The city was
the germ of each body politic, and the connection of roads with cities is
obvious. But our Teutonic ancestors abhorred civic life. They generally
shunned the towns, even when accident had placed them in the very centre
of their shires or marks, and when the proximity of great rivers or the
convenience of walls and markets seemed to hold out every inducement to
take possession of the vacant enclosures. The castle and the cathedral
became the nucleus of the Teutonic cities. Hamlets crept around the
precincts of the sacred and the outworks of the secular building: but it
was long before the Lord Abbot or the Lord Chatelain regarded with any
feelings but disdain, the burgher who exercised his trade or exposed his
wares in the narrow lanes of the town which abutted on his domains, and
enriched his manorial exchequer.

In many cases indeed the Roman cities were allowed to decay: the forest
resumed its rights: the feudal castle was constructed from the ruins of
the Proconsul's palace and the Basilica, or if these edifices were too
massive for demolition, they were left standing in the waste--the
Mammoths and Saurians of a bygone civilization. The great Viae were for
leagues over