ad so as to show up all the abuses.
And how true is Buckle's observation in his _History of Civilisation_
that all recent legislation is the undoing of bad laws made in the
interest of certain classes. How could there be an active public opinion
in the conditions of the times? Everybody was shut off from everybody
else. Hear further what Mackenzie says in his _History of the Nineteenth
Century_, referring to the end of last century: "The seclusion resulting
from the absence of roads rendered it necessary that every little
community, in some measure every family, should produce all that it
required to consume. The peasant raised his own food; he grew his own
flax or wool; his wife or daughter spun it; and a neighbour wove it
into cloth. He learned to extract dyes from plants which grew near his
cottage. He required to be independent of the external world from which
he was effectively shut out. Commerce was impossible until men could
find the means of transferring commodities from the place where they
were produced to the place where there were people willing to make use
of them." So much for the difficulty of exchanging ordinary produce. The
exchange of thought suffered in a like fashion.

In the first half of the present century severe restrictions were placed
upon the spread of news, not only by the heavy postage for letter
correspondence, but by the equally heavy newspaper tax. Referring to
this latter hindrance to the spread of light Mackenzie says: "The
newspaper is the natural enemy of despotic government, and was treated
as such in England. Down to 1765 the duty imposed was only one penny,
but as newspapers grew in influence the restraining tax was increased
from time to time, until in 1815 it reached the maximum of fourpence."
At this figure the tax seems to have continued many years, for under the
year 1836 Mackenzie refers to it as such, and remarks, "that this
rendered the newspaper a very occasional luxury to the working man; that
the annual circulation of newspapers in the United Kingdom was no more
than thirty-six million copies, and that these had only three hundred
thousand readers."

At the present time the combined annual circulation of a couple of the
leading newspapers in Scotland would equal the entire newspaper
circulation of the kingdom little more than fifty years ago. In the year
1799, which is less than a hundred years ago, the _Edinburgh Evening
Courant_ and the _Glasgow Courier_, two very sma