h great through lines as may be necessary to maintain
inter-state commerce, and across-the-continent traffic. Other roads,
they may not sell at any price. A government for the people, and by the
people, will have no further use for them.

"Then at last, the supreme folly of having a half-dozen competing lines,
running side by side through the same territory, will be fully
demonstrated. With this demonstration, will come the opportunity, to
scores of paid press writers, pessimistic bigots, self-conceited,
unprogressive wiseacres, who have so long and so loudly derided the
government ownership of railroads, as the most suicidal and unbusiness
like scheme ever hatched; to answer this pertinent question: Would it be
possible, for government engineers building public railroads, to ever be
guilty of such monumental stupidity?

"The social effect of these good roads, on the lives of all
agricultural people, will prove even more important than the financial
advantages gained. Hitherto, they have been so hampered by environments,
by lack of means, and lack of leisure, that as a class they have been
unable to enjoy or to appreciate the wonderful, the educational, the
broadening and the refining effect of much travel, on the mind of the
individual. From lack of experience, they do not realize that the sum of
human life is the sum of its sensations, which are produced by change of
environment, contact with a larger or lesser series of natural
phenomena, and more especially with other lives.

"The more progressive lessons of life, are learned from example and not
from precept. Men and women, are only children of a larger growth, they
are imitative creatures with a natural instinct to choose other, higher,
and better lives as models. Hence the great value of travel as an
educator. The larger the area covered by the traveler, the wider the
field of experience and choice. Through the law of action and reaction,
social contact with a multitude of actors and thinkers, refines the
individual. A healthy spirit of emulation is aroused, which leads on to
progress.

"With the advent of a universal system of good roads, cheap travel, and
a dominant combination of co-operative, industrial and agricultural
enterprise, an extraordinary era of recreation and travel, will dawn for
all rural people. Opportunity, leisure, and means will be abundant. All
co-operative workers, can afford to take an annual vacation of at least
one month. The ownersh