nor the river meet all the needs of the
men living on those roads. You might build the railroads up until they
are 10 tracks wide, but you do not fully help the farmer 10 miles away
to get his produce to market. And you might fill the river with
steamers, and he may be still isolated. There must come something to
his farm which transports his produce easily and systematically and in
harmony with other methods in duplex action going and coming. So our
friend the farmer must have the rural express or its equivalent, which
comes to his door, which in the morning connects him up with all the
round earth and brings him what he wants of the earth's products back
to his door that night.

I can not think of that except as a matter of common sense. It is a
thing which has got to be, and in a very few years, at least, will be
as accepted as such things as the rising of the sun and the setting of
the sun. It will be considered normal. You will even find, if you have
not already found, farms offered for sale on the basis of having a
rural express coming and going on one side of it--perhaps on two sides
of it as we get into it more thoroughly. The whole rural
postal-delivery system was the promise and pledge of the rural
express. What we do when we send the motor truck through the rural
centers is to push the rural free-delivery and the parcel-post service
just one step forward. I have had motor trucks put on the Pribilof
Islands, in the Behring Sea. They are building the roads to run on
before they can run on them. And there, 250 miles north of the
Aleutian Islands, we can make motor trucks pay for themselves in a
single year by the force they add in effective transportation. We have
a seal rookery 13 or 14 miles from the village of St. Paul Island. We
have not been able to kill seals there, because we could not get skins
down to the village. Now a couple of motor trucks bring them down
without the least difficulty, and in order to get the road there they
carried down materials to build the road. So in the same way we have a
great many fishery stations isolated. You can not put fish hatcheries
in towns. We get them as far off as practicable. The problem is to get
sufficient water and isolation, and so those stations are rather
difficult to reach. In those places to-day we have put motor trucks.
Here with these important stations 6, 8, 9, and 10 miles and sometimes
more away, it was perfectly obvious that the best, simplest, and
qu