and commerce, which gave the country the extraordinary prosperity which it has since, almost without a check, enjoyed.  The external appearance of England presented a new aspect.  A fourth part of the whole land was redeemed from waste and put under cultivation.[116] The advance in agriculture and manufactures, making necessary better means of communication, introduced canals and substituted fine highways for the old muddy, robber-infested roads.  The condition of these as late as 1736 may be inferred from that of the road between Kensington and London:  “The road between this place and London is grown so infamously bad, that we live here in the same solitude as we should do if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean, and all the Londoners tell us there is between them and us a great, impassable gulf of mud.  There are two roads through the Park, but the new one is so convex and the old one so concave, that by this extreme of faults they agree in the common one of being, like the high-road, impassable."[117]

Social life was marked by the same corruption, by the same absence of high aspirations and standards which we have seen in politics.  The nation, especially the higher ranks, had not recovered from the license of the Restoration, while the agencies which can preserve virtue and refinement in a society were almost inactive.  Religion, partly in consequence of the reaction which followed the civil wars, and partly in consequence of the spread of rational tendencies, had lost its hold on society, and no longer sufficed to keep it in check.  Theological controversy, although it issue in narrowness and persecution, yet has the merit of keeping alive an appreciation of high moral qualities and aims.  In the absence of strong religious feeling, there is yet in the human mind a natural preference for what is beautiful and honorable, usually taking the form of ideals, which may keep up a social tone.  This may be seen in the age of Elizabeth, not a very religious period, but one in which poetry and elevation of thought overshadow coarseness and immorality.  The nineteenth century, again, is neither marked by strong religious feelings nor by any great tendency to idealization.  And yet the nineteenth century has its standard, firmly based on public opinion, made up of a respect for decency and justice, a love of refinement, and an appreciation of the expediency as well as the attractiveness of virtue; a standard which influences many minds over which religion has little control.  But in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, religion had ceased to govern, and had not yet attained that moral influence which, even in the absence of strong faith, establishes rectitude of conduct, philanthropy, and purity of thought in the minds of men.  The ideals and aspirations of preceding centuries had no meaning for what Addison called an “understanding age,” and the standard of order, refinement and taste of the present had yet to come.  The low state of