return to the road is a gain. We only know England when we know her roads. The English roads are like wood-fringed rivers that run twisting and turning through our villages and towns. No one can travel down fifty miles of an English road without coming upon a hundred beautiful and unexpected things, and seeing those things in the best possible way and as they ought to be seen. When we see scenery from the railways, or, at any rate, the near-at-hand scenery, we are, as it were, looking at the brocade of the landscape on the wrong side. We see the pattern awry and upside down. We cut across the roads, not wind down them. We see the old church or the old manor-house not in a picture composed by centuries of usage and of kindly human courtesies. Things as seen from the railway are for the most part set on wrong, face the wrong way, and as it were 'grate on the sensitive ear with a slightly mercantile accent.' The coalshed or the chimney of the heating apparatus is turned towards us in the train, and not the best line of gables or the old lych gate.
III
Perhaps it will be said that all these prophecies as to a return to the road are of very doubtful value, that the motor-car can never really beat the railway, and that as soon as the present fad has passed away, the railway will return to its old ascendency. I do not agree. The autocars will not, of course, rival or destroy the railways. The present railways will always continue to do the heavy and long-distance traffic of the country, while fast mono-rail electric railways will carry the express passenger traffic. Rather the motor-car will feed and immensely increase the demand for express trains and long-distance journeys. The motor-car will not so much injure the railway as call a new kind of traveller into existence. Cross-journey traffic with its many changes, suburban traffic and short-distance traffic may suffer, but it will be amply compensated for by a great increase in the demand for long-
