t of which they,
however, are to be the chief beneficiaries; the state itself, in all its
parts, benefits from the improved conditions which follow improved
roads, and should bear a portion of the expense. Do not think that city
people escape the tax of bad roads. In St. Louis four hundred thousand
people consume five hundred tons of produce every day. The cost of
hauling this produce over bad roads averages twenty-five cents per mile
and over good roads about ten cents per mile, making a difference of
fifteen cents per mile per ton. For five hundred tons, hauled from farms
averaging ten miles distance, this would be seven hundred and fifty
dollars per day, or a quarter of a million dollars a year--enough to
build fifty miles of macadamized road a year. The farmers shift as much
as they can of their heavy tax on the city people--the consumer pays the
freight. Everybody is concerned in the "mud-tax" of bad roads.

And so what is known as the "state aid" plan has become popular. By this
plan the state pays a fixed part of the cost of building roads out of
the general fund raised by taxation of all the people and all the
property in the state. Under these circumstances corporations,
railroads, and the various representatives of the concentrated wealth of
the cities all contribute to this fund. The funds are expended in rural
districts and are supplemented by money raised by local taxation.

The state of New York, which has a good system, pays one-half of the
good roads fund; each county pays thirty-five per cent, and the
township fifteen per cent. Pennsylvania has appropriated at one time six
and a half millions as a good roads fund. The new Ohio law apportions
the cost of new roads as follows: The state pays twenty-five per cent,
the townships twenty-five per cent, and the county fifty per cent. Of
the twenty-five per cent paid by the townships fifteen per cent is to be
paid by owners of abutting property and ten per cent by the township as
a whole. In New Jersey, which has a model system of road-building and
many model roads, the state pays a third, the county a third, and the
property owners a third.

A more recent theory in American road-building which has been advanced
is a plan of national aid.[1] This is no new thing in America, though it
has been many years since the government has paid attention to roadways.
In the early days the wisest of our statesmen advocated large plans of
internal improvement; one great na