The  poor  rate  used  to  bear  the  expense  of  roads  and  prisons,  and,
in  so  far  as  the  duty  was  not  satisfied  by  compulsory  service,  of
j)olice.     The  roads,  to  be   sure,  since  1773,  were  on  the  whole


490    CHARACTER  OF  LOCAL  TAXATION  IN  ENGLAND.
maintained  by  tolls  levied  on  passing  vehicles,  considerable  excep-
tions being  made  in  the  case  of  agricultural  carriages.  It  must  be
allowed  that  some  thirty  years  before  new  methods  of  locomotion
were  invented  or  appHed,  the  trustees  of  these  roads,  animated  no
doubt  by  motives  of  enlightened  self-interest,  mended  them  decently.
For  some  time,  however,  after  the  Act  of  1773  (you  may  find  it  ia
the  hterature  of  the  time)  the  permission  to  levy  toUs  was  not
made  the  ground  for  repairing  the  roads,  but  for  saving  the  rate.
The  stage  coach  of  the  eighteenth  century  paid  heavy  toUs,  of
course  taken  out  of  the  passengers'  fares,  and  was  not  infrequently
stranded  in  a  slough.  There  is  a  story,  perhaps  a  legend,  that  at
the  end  of  the  last  century  the  Oxford  coach  going  to  London,
and  not  over-laden  with  University  professors,  was  absorbed  in  some
Serbonian  bog  on  the  old  eastward  road  over  Shotover.  You  have
heard  of  the  scholar  of  Queen's,  who  choked  the  Shotover  boar  that
charged  him  with  his  Aristotle,  and  brought  his  head,  no  doubt,  to-
the  Christmas  festivities  of  that  college  of  the  plural  Queens.  Non
defensonhus  istis,  non  tali  auxilio  must  have  been,  if  the  story  is  true,
the  despairing  cry  of  those  engulfed  passengers.  The  story  may
not  have  been  true,  but  it  must  have  been  possible.
