ded, and the roller compacts and keeps it there.
The labor-saving machinery now manufactured for road-building is just as
effectual and necessary as the modern mower, self-binder, and thrasher.
Road graders and rollers are the modern inventions necessary to
permanent and economical construction. Two men with two teams can build
more road in one day with a grader and roller than fifty men can with
picks and shovels, and do it more uniformly and more thoroughly.

Doubtless the best way to keep an earth road, or any road, for that
matter, in repair is by the use of wide tires on all wagons carrying
heavy burdens. Water and narrow tires aid each other in destroying
streets, macadam, gravel, and earth roads. Narrow tires are also among
the most destructive agents to the fields, pastures, and meadows of
farms, while on the other hand wide tires are road-makers; they roll and
harden the surface, and every loaded wagon becomes in effect a road
roller. Nothing so much tends to the improving of a road as the
continued rolling of its surface.

Tests recently made at the experiment stations in Utah and Missouri show
that wide tires not only improve the surface of roads, but that under
ordinary circumstances less power is required to pull a wagon on which
wide tires are used. The introduction in recent years of a wide metallic
tire which can be placed on any narrow-tired wheel at the cost of two
dollars each, has removed one very serious objection to the proposed
substitution of broad tires for the narrow ones now in use.

Repairs on earth roads should be attended to particularly in the spring
of the year, but the great mistake of letting all the repairs go until
that time should rot be made. The great want of the country road is
daily care, and the sooner we do away with the system of "working out"
our road taxes, and pay such taxes in money, the sooner will it be
possible to build improved roads and to hire experts to keep them
constantly in good repair. Roads could then secure attention when such
attention is most needed. If they are repaired only annually or
semiannually they are seldom in good condition but when they are given
daily or weekly care they are almost always in good condition, and,
moreover, the second method costs far less than the first. A portion of
all levy tax money raised for road purposes should be used in buying
improved road machinery, and in constructing each year a few miles of
improved stone or gravel