The Coach as a Public Menace

Extract

The man who regards the “elder times” as the good old days is a feature of all ages. In the sixteenth century the coach was denounced as a dangerous innovation, and in the seventeenth, conservatives lamented the crowding of the roads with the new vehicles, and found in them a menace to the public integrity. In a book written in 1837, by William Bridges Adams on English Pleasure Carriages the history of the invention and progress of wheeled carriages and the stir caused by their introduction into the various countries is amusingly given, as a preface to a lengthy description of the construction of the various types of pleasure carriages then in use.