ery dollar for the maintenance of these roads or your
money has gone to waste and your conception is idle. And you gentlemen
know, if you continue, as I hope you will, after the war, you will
have not merely a function in the securing of the building of good
roads, but will have a very great function in the maintaining of these
roads as actual arteries in the system of transportation of the
country. You remember that at Verdun the railroad was cut off, and
Verdun was supported by the fact that she had trucks which could go 40
feet apart all night long over the great highway that had been built
from Paris to the east.

Now I saw my first national service in connection with the Interstate
Commerce Commission and I was much impressed by the theory that the
railroad men had, which was a very natural theory, arising out of
their own experience and out of the fact that there was a new force in
the world with which they were playing. Their conception was that the
highway was a mere means of getting from the farm to the railroad;
that the waterway was a mere means of carrying off the surplus waters
from the hills to the oceans. The statement has often been made to me
that there would never be an occasion when it would be necessary or
possible to put into competition with the railroads the waterways of
this country; that it would cost more to use those waterways or to use
highways than it would to do the same transportation work by railroad.
And they had obtained figures to show that under conditions of
unlimited competition the Illinois Central, for instance, paralleling
the Mississippi River, could do business at a cheaper rate than it
could be transported by water, considering the cost of bringing it to
the water station and unloading it at the other end. Now, as Mr.
Chapin has said, a larger conception has come into the American
mind--the conception of the utilization of all our resources. While
the railroad has a great burden cast upon it; while it is the strong
right arm in this work, still we must remember that the strong right
arm must have fingers, and that there should be in a complete physical
system a good left arm.

The highways that you are interested in are more than interesting to
me for another reason.

I have thought of the men who will come back after the war. Every
nation has had a problem to deal with the returning soldier. If you
read Ferraro's history of Rome, you will find that one of the chief
reason