score of
advantages where now they have but this one. Like rural delivery it may
seem impracticable, but in a short space of time America will leap
forward in the front rank of the nations in point of good highways.

An execrable road system, besides bringing poor schools and poor
churches, has rendered impossible any genuine community of social
interests among country people. At the very season when the farm work is
light and social intercourse feasible, at that season the highways have
been impassable. To this and the poor schools and churches may be
attributed the saddest and really most costly social revolution in
America in the past quarter of a century. The decline of country living
must in the nature of things prove disastrously costly to any nation.
"The roar of the cannon and the gleam of swords," wrote that brilliant
apostle of outdoor life, Dr. W. H. H. Murray, "is less significant than
the destruction of New England homesteads, the bricking up of New
England fireplaces and the doing away with the New England well-sweep;
for these show a change in the nature of the circulation itself, and
prove that the action of the popular heart has been interrupted,
modified and become altogether different from what it was." In the
popular mind the benefits of country living are common only as a fad;
the boy who goes to college and returns to the farm again is one of a
thousand. Who wants to be landlocked five months of the year, without
social advantages? Good roads, in one generation, would accomplish a
social revolution throughout the United States that would greatly tend
to better our condition and brighten the prospect of future strength.
President Winston of the North Carolina State College of Agriculture
said: "It might be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that bad roads
are unfavorable to matrimony and increase of population." Seven of the
most stalwart lads and beautiful lasses of Greece were sent each year to
Crete to be sacrificed to the Minotaur; bad roads in America send
thousands of boys and girls into our cities to the Minotaurs of evil
because conditions in the country do not make for the social happiness
for which they naturally yearn.

Thus we may hint at the greater, more serious, phase of the road
problem. Beside it, the financial feature of the problem can have no
place; the farm has been too much to the American nation, its product of
boys and girls has been too eternally precious to the cause