Page:Remarks on the Present System of Road Making (1823).djvu/184

 impositions on the carters: the machine being so contrived as to be locked up from the machine-keeper, and accessible only to the surveyor, and so as to exhibit the exact weight by a revolving index, like the hands of a clock, which are called clock-face indexes; a great number of these weighing machines have long been in use in the kingdom, some in the immediate environs of London: by looking at the index of which machine, the carter, or any passer by, may see that the machine, before the carriage is drawn upon its weigh-bridge, is in just balance; and all the time the carriage remains upon the weigh-bridge, the index exhibits the weight, so that the carter can take it down; and at the same time the dial-plate is made an abstract of the law, by there being written against each of the weights fixed, the breadth of the carriage-wheel, and the season to which that weight is applicable at the commencement of penalties for over-weights.

Can you inform the Committee of the expense of a machine of this description?—I cannot; but it is trifling, compared with its advantages, and an index may be added to a machine upon the common principle, using weights, placed in a scale; they may be applied to any good machine already in use.

Are you of opinion there exists any necessity for limiting the number of horses in carts and wagons, upon roads where there are weighing-machines?—I am of opinion not; and even doubt the propriety of calculating the gate-toll by the number of horses which draw the carriage. Upon private or parish roads, where no machines are erected, there eems, however, no other mode of regulating or preventing excessive loads being carried, to the ruin of the roads, than limiting the number of horses; but in case of the practice becoming general, which already prevails in many of the towns in the middle of England, of there being a weighing