Morning journal and courier., 1891-12-02
Profit of Good Country Roads.

distance, in this advanced year of grace, leagues. We have gone beyond all that. London is nearer to New York than was Buffalo sixty years ago. We exchange goods with California every hour of the day; talk with our friends in Europe in less time than it takes to write and post a letter; ride twenty miles by rail to busi- ness in the morning, and home by the same route at night; travel more miles and accomplish more business in day than was possible for our grandfathers to do in month; and have no regrets, ex- oept for those few things which have to be left undone for lack of time. To accom- plish all this we have directed the national hand, and loosened the national purse strings, to the encouragement of improved industrial methods, to the establishment of great commercial and mechanical cen ters, and, in certain directions, to the aid of enlarged and quickened means of trans portstion; we have pledged the public credit, granted public lands and passed laws-general and special-to ameliorate the risks of capital and insure the con- struction of railroads; and We have spent hundreds of millions of the public money to deepen our rivers and harbors and pro- vide ample outlets for the accommodating inland trade.
 Meanwhile what of the dirty road, the only avenue of communication which con- meets the farmer socially and commercially with the world at large! It is the same road that was used hundred centuries ago by the naked savage when chased by & etOrn fn the shaltArInO and fr0r, him it seems to have descended as an entailed legacy to the American government. In all these years it has not changed, except that the modern article is more or less churned and mangled by narrow wheel tires, and fanked by costly and useless fences, two species of property unknown to our primitive ancestor, and first con- ceived at the later period which marked the dividing line between instinct and inn becility. Measuring million miles or more in its various ramifcations, dissol wing in the rains of April, baking and pulverizing beneath the rays of the mid summer sun, drifting and disappearing in the whirlwinds of November, and pre- senting at all times but little more than a roughened streak of soil to serve as a land highway for the great volume of internal traffic, the time seems to have come when the American common road may rightfully assert itself as the most expensive and by | all odds the most extrsvsgantly maintained | of all the public institutions.
 No great country can afford to neglect | its farmers, or to abandon any reasonable | measure by which the encouragement of agriculture is likely to be insured. Yet | agriculture in the United States, if not &C., | tually declining, has certainly witnessed 8 | long season of depression, and has been | nowhere spurred to the same conditions of | increase and thrift that have marked SO | many industries in the cities and towns | To them are accorded all the improve ments of the age,-improvements con ceived in self-interest, wrought by capital labeled with 6 price, and displayed in the | marts of huckstering trade. To them the | common road appears to be of remote con cern. They send and receive by the ca
 nals, the railroads and the steamships; and
 their finished and refined products are car.
 ried thousand miles at less price per tor
 than it costs the farmer to move the same
 weight of crude material from his farm tc
 the nearest local market. Institute any
 comparison you will, and it seems bound
 to appear that-in spite of his intelligence
 toll and sobriety, and in the face of an in
 creased consumption and growing market
 the American farmer is badly handicapped
 in his industrial race with other branche
 of society.
 The public roads, though placed, fo
 some obscure reason, within the immedist
 care of the farming population, have {
 paramount importance to the people a
 large, to whom, indeed, they in fact be
 long. The great volume of internal trad | in every state is the common road trade
 It exceeds by countless tons the entir
 freight tonnage of all the railroads com
 bined; for besides this freight, which is 8
 first carted in one form or another owe
 the public road, there is still greate quantity of produce of all kinds wheeled
 over these roads to fill the demands of tn
 local market and satisfy the requirement.
 of home consumption. The cost of thi
 form of transportation. be it great o
 small, is in the end paid, in part at least by the consumer What, in figures, is tt
 volume of this tradei In the present yea
 200, 900, 900 bushels of grain Qndian corr
 AT, ,000, 900 tons of hay, 270, 900 tons of tC about 140, ,000, 900 bushels of potatoes , To supply grain for the increased expol demand produced by the shortage of EI
 ropean crops, we shall have a supply (
 about 200, ,000, ,000 bushels of wheat an , 300, ,000, ,000 to 400, 900, 900 bushels of corr ] Besides filling the local markets, we al
 hauling over our common roads enoug
 produce, in one form or another, to suI ply freighting business for one hundre : and fifty thousand miles of railroad using more than one million freight car and earning traffic income in 1890 [ nearly one billion dollars, including u carriage receipts on nearly seven hundrt 8 million tons of freight.