Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/241

Rh that two surveyors of the highways shall be annually elected in every parish, as is still done, and that the parishioners shall attend four days in every year for their repair with wains or carts, oxen, horses, or other cattle, and all other necessaries, and also able men with the same, according to the quantity of land occupied by each; householders, cottagers, and others, not having land, if they be not hired labourers, by themselves or sufficient substitutes giving their personal work or travail. Upon this statute were founded all the highway acts that were subsequently passed before the introduction of tolls or turnpikes in the reign of Charles II. Of these there were six in all passed in the reign of Mary, and about nineteen in that of Elizabeth.

In the course of the long reign of Elizabeth the commerce and navigation of England may be said to have risen through the whole of the space that in the life of a human being would be described as intervening between the close of infancy and commencing manhood. It was the age of the vigorous boyhood and adolescence of the national industry, when, although its ultimate conquests were still afar off, the path that led to them was fairly and in good earnest entered upon, and every step was one of progress and buoyant with hope. In the busier scene, however, that now opens upon us, the crowd of recorded facts is too great to be marshalled within our limited space, and, passing over many things that would properly enter into a complete chronological deduction of our commerce from the point at which we are arrived, we must confine ourselves to a selection of a few of the most indicative particulars.

An act was passed by Elizabeth's first parliament (the stat. 1 Eliz. c. 13) which is remarkable for a liberality of view going far beyond the notions that were clung to by our commercial legislation in much later times. The preamble is a confession of the loss and inconvenience that had already avenged the interference of the legislature with the natural freedom of commerce by the introduction of the principle of what have been called the navigation laws. Since the making of those statutes