University of Virginia Library

XXIII
AT ODEON HALL, ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, BEFORE
THE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL GOOD
ROADS CONVENTION, APRIL 29, 1903

Mr. Chairman, ladies, and gentlemen:

When we wish to use descriptive terms fit to characterize
great empires and the man who made those empires
great, invariably one of the terms used is to signify that
that empire built good roads. When we speak of the
Romans, we speak of them as rulers, as conquerors, as
administrators, as road-builders. There were empires
that rose overnight and fell overnight, empires whose
influence was absolutely evanescent, which have passed
away without leaving a trace of their former existence;
but wherever the Roman established his rule the traces
of that rule remain deep to-day, stamped on the language
and customs of the people, or stamped in tangible form
upon the soil itself. And so passing through Britain
fifteen centuries and over after the dominion of Rome
passed away the Roman roads as features still remain;
going through Italy where power after power has arisen,
and flourished, and vanished since the days when the
temporal dominion of the Roman Emperors transferred
its seat from Rome to Byzantium—going through Italy
after the Lombard, the Goth, the Byzantine, and all the
people of the Middle Ages that have ruled that country,
—it is the imperishable Roman road that reappears.

The faculty, the art, the habit, of road building marks
in a nation those solid, stable qualities which tell for
permanent greatness. Merely from the standpoint of

historic analogy we should have a right to ask that this
people which has tamed a continent, which has built up a
country with a continent for its base, which boasts itself,
with truth, as the mightiest Republic that the world has
ever seen, which I firmly believe will in the century now
opening rise to a position of headship and leadership such
as no other nation has ever yet attained,—merely from
historic analogy, I say, we should have a right to demand
that such a nation build good roads. Much more have
we the right to demand it from the practical standpoint.
The great difference between the semi-barbarism of the
Middle Ages and the civilization which succeeded it was
the difference between poor and good means of communication.
And we to whom space is less of an obstacle
than ever it was in the history of any other nation, we who
have spanned a continent, who have thrust our border
westward in the course of a century and a quarter until
it has gone from the Atlantic to the Alleghanies, from
the Alleghanies down into the valley of the Mississippi,
across the great plains, over the Rockies to where the
Golden Gate lets through the long heaving waters of the
Pacific, and finally to Alaska, to the Arctic regions, to
the tropic islands of the sea—we who take so little account
of mere space, must see to it that the best means
of nullifying the existence of space are at our command.

Of course, during the last century there has been an
altogether phenomenal growth of one kind of road wholly
unknown to the people of an earlier period—the iron
road. The railroad is, of course, something purely
modern. A great many excellent people have proceeded
upon the assumption that somehow or other having good
railways should be a substitute for having good highways,
good ordinary roads. A more untenable position
cannot be imagined. What the railway does is to develop
the country; and of course its development implies that
the developed country will need more and better roads.

A few years ago it was a matter of national humiliation
that there should be so little attention paid to our roads;
that there should be a willingness not merely to refrain
from making good roads, but to let the roads that were
in existence become worse. I cannot too heartily congratulate
our people upon the existence of a body such
as this, ramifying into every section of the country, having
its connections in every State of the country, and
bent upon that eminently proper work of making the
conditions of life easier and better for the people whom
of all others we can least afford to see grow discontented
with their lot in life—the people who live in the country
districts. The extraordinary, the wholly unheard-of, rate
of our industrial development during the past seventy-five
years, together with the good sides has had some evil
sides. It is a fine thing to see our cities built up, but
not at the expense of the country districts. The healthy
thing to see is the building up of both the country and
city go hand in hand. But we cannot expect the ablest,
the most eager, the most ambitious young men to stay in
the country, to stay on the farm, unless they have certain
advantages. If the farm life is a life of isolation, a life in
which it is a matter of great and real difficulty for one
man to communicate with his neighbor, you can rest assured
that there will be a tendency to leave it on the part
of those very people whom we should most wish to see
stay in it. It is a good thing to encourage in every way
any tendency which will tend to check an unhealthy flow
from the country to the city. There are several such
tendencies in evidence at present. The growth of electricity
as a means of transportation tends to a certain
degree to exercise a centrifugal force to offset the centripetal
force of steam. Exactly as steam and electricity
have tended to gather men in masses, so now electricity,
as applied to the purposes which steam has so long
claimed as exclusively its own, tends again to scatter out

the masses. The trolley lines that go out into the country
are doing a great deal to render it more possible to
live in the country and yet not to lose wholly the advantages
of the town. The telephone is not to be minimized
as an instrument with a tendency in the same direction;
and rural free delivery is playing its part along the same
lines. But no one thing can do more to offset the tendency
toward an unhealthy growth from the country into
the city than the making and keeping of good roads.
They are needed for the sake of their effect upon the industrial
conditions of the country districts; and I am almost
tempted to say they are needed for the sake of social
conditions in the country districts. If winter means to
the average farmer the existence of a long line of liquid
morasses through which he is to move his goods if bent
on business, or to wade and swim if bent on pleasure; if
winter means that after an ordinary rain the farmer boy
or girl cannot use his or her bicycle; if a little heavy
weather means a stoppage of all communication not only
with industrial centres but with the neighbors, you must
expect that there will be a great many young people of
both sexes who will not find farm life attractive. It is
for this reason that I feel the work you are doing is so
pre-eminently one in the interest of the nation as a whole.
I congratulate you upon the fact that you are doing it.
In our American life it would be hard to overestimate
the amount of good that has been accomplished by associations
of individuals who have gathered together to
work for a common object which was to be of benefit to
the community as a whole; and among all the excellent
objects for which men and women combine to work today,
there are few indeed which have a better right to
command the energies of those engaged in the movement,
and the hearty sympathy and support of those outside,
than this movement in which you are engaged.