se three ways of transporting developed to their full are not
hostile to each other. In the days of our ignorance we thought they
were. In other times the railroad bought canals to suppress them. But
we have learned a larger outlook now and the congestion so recently as
a year ago taught us that there are certain kinds of goods, certain
types of transportation, that the railways of this country can not
afford to do. Certain great items of bulk freight they must always
carry. We should starve for steel if we had to depend upon our
railroads to bring the ores from Minnesota to Pittsburgh, and the
Northwest would be in a hard case if we had always to send coal to
them by rail from the region of the East. We are learning that there
is a differentiation in transportation. So these two enemies of the
past are likely to operate as friends to-day. It is not a strange
thing that the internal waterways of the country are at this time
being operated by the Railroad Administration. It means an advance in
thought.

I told the Director General of Railways that two-thirds of the job was
fairly well in hand, but that he had left out one-third, and that I
thought he would not get his unity complete until he made it a trinity
by taking in the highways. I told him that the highways as a
transportation system and their development both as to roads and as to
means of using the roads were quite as essential to the country as the
other two. In reply he suggested that it was a larger job than he
himself could undertake, with the railroads and the waterways on his
hands, and asked me if I would not do it. To my regret I was obliged
to refuse. The law does not give me authority. I should have been glad
if I could have had more of a part in it, because, given your
perfected railroad--and I speak as a friend of the railroad and a
friend of the waterway, which I think is also coming into its own--I
am convinced that neither will reach its normal place as a servant of
the people unless linked up with motor-truck routes.

There is a steamboat line running from New Haven to New York. At New
Haven lines of motor trucks radiate out in several directions. From
this radius around New Haven for many miles in three directions the
motor trucks come down in the evening to the boat. The boat leaves a
little before midnight and arrives in New York in the morning, when
the freight is transferred and goes out on the early trains for the
West. It is a good syste