nts which Virginia has given to the nation,
whose monuments are all around us, whose remains rest in your midst,
whose fame is immortal, drew life and inspiration from rural homes. The
typical American today is the American farmer. The city life, with its
bustle and stir, its hurry and rush, its feverish anxiety for wealth,
position, and rank in society, its fretting over ceremonies and
precedents, is breaking down the health and intellect and the morals of
its inhabitants. These must be replenished from the rural home. Whatever
shall tend to create a love for country life, to decrease the rush for
the city, instil a desire to dwell in the society of nature, will make
for the health, the happiness, the refinement, the moral and
intellectual improvement of the people. Nothing will contribute more to
this than the improvement of our common roads, to facilitate the means
of communication between one section of the country and the other, and
between all and the city."

* * * * *

Turning now from the high plane of the social and moral effect of good
roads, let us look at the financial side of the question.

Good roads pay well. In urging good roads in Virginia, an official of
the Southern Railway said that if good roads improved the value of
lands only one dollar per acre, the gain to the state by the improvement
of all the roads would be twenty-five million dollars. Yet this is an
inconceivably low estimate; lands upon improved roads advance in value
from four to twenty dollars per acre. Virginia could therefore expect a
benefit from improved highways of at least one hundred million
dollars--more than enough to improve her roads many times over. Indeed
this matter of the increase in value of land occasioned by good roads
can hardly be overestimated. Near all of our large towns and cities the
land will advance until it is worth per foot what it was formerly worth
per acre. Take Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Beginning in 1880 to
macadamize three or four miles of road a year with an annual fund of
$10,000, the county now has over a hundred miles of splendid roads; the
county seat has increased in population from 5,000 to 30,000. "I know of
a thirty-acre farm," said President Barringer of the University of
Virginia, a native of that county, "that cost ten dollars an acre, and
forty-six dollars an acre has been refused for it, and yet not a dollar
has been put on it, not even to fertilize