lic highways ought not to be occupied by
people demonstrating that motion is impossible. Hence, when we trace
back the history of the race to the dawn of civilization, we find that
the first sponsors of art and science, commerce and manufacture,
education and government, were the builders and supporters of public
highways.

The two most ancient civilizations situated in the valleys of the Nile
and the Euphrates were connected by a commercial and military highway
leading from Babylon to Memphis, along which passed the war chariots
and the armies of the great chieftains and military kings of ancient
days, and over which were carried the gems, the gold, the spices, the
ivories, the textile fabrics, and all the curious and unrivalled
productions of the luxurious Orient. On the line of this roadway arose
Nineveh, Palmyra, Damascus, Tyre, Antioch, and other great commercial
cities.

On the southern shores of the Mediterranean the Carthaginians built up
and consolidated an empire so prominent in military and naval
achievements and in the arts and industries of civilized life, that for
four hundred years it was able to hold its own against the
preponderance of Greece and Rome; and as might have been expected, they
were systematic and scientific road-makers from whom the Romans learned
the art of road-building.

The Romans were apt scholars, and possessed a wonderful capacity not
only to utilize prior inventions but also to develop them. They were
beyond question the most successful and masterful road-builders in the
ancient world; and the perfection of their highways was one of the most
potent causes of their superiority in progress and civilization. When
they conquered a province they not only annexed it politically, by
imposing on its people their laws and system of government, but they
annexed it socially and commercially, by the construction of good roads
from its chief places to one or more of the great roadways which
brought them in easy and direct communication with the metropolis of
the Roman world. And when their territory reached from the remote east
to the farthest west, and a hundred millions of people acknowledged
their military and political supremacy, their capital city was in the
centre of such a network of highways that it was then a common saying,
"All roads lead to Rome." From the forum of Rome a broad and
magnificent highway ran out towards every province of the empire. It
was terraced up with sand, grav