sheet an object of ridicule. Eighteen years later the canal was built and in the first year brought in a revenue of $492,664. So with the first Rural Free Delivery appropriation—the postmaster general to whose hands that first $50,000 was entrusted for experimental purposes, refused to try it and sent the money back to the treasury. Today the Rural Free Delivery is an established fact, of immeasurable benefit; and if any of the appropriations for it are not expended it is not because they are being sent back to the treasury by scrupulous officials. Rural delivery routes diverge from our towns and cities and give the country people the advantages of a splendid post office system. Good roads to these cities would give them a score of advantages where now they have but this one. Like rural delivery it may seem impracticable, but in a short space of time America will leap forward in the front rank of the nations in point of good highways.

An execrable road system, besides bringing poor schools and poor churches, has rendered impossible any genuine community of social interests among country people. At the very season when the farm work is light and social intercourse feasible, at that season the highways have been impassable. To this and the poor schools and churches may be attributed the saddest and really most costly social revolution in America in the past quarter of a century. The decline of country living must in the nature of things prove disastrously costly to any nation. "The roar of the cannon and the gleam of swords," wrote that brilliant apostle of outdoor life, Dr. W. H. H. Murray, "is less significant than the destruction of New England homesteads, the bricking up of New England fireplaces and the doing away with the New England well-sweep; for these show a change in the nature of the circulation itself, and prove that the action of the popular heart has been interrupted, modified and become altogether different from what it was." In the popular mind the benefits of country living are common only as a fad; the boy who goes to college and returns to the farm again is one of a thousand. Who wants to be landlocked five months of the year, without social advantages? Good roads, in one generation, would accomplish a social revolution throughout the United States that would greatly tend to better our condition and brighten the prospect of future strength. President Winston of the North Carolina State College of Agriculture said: "It might be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that bad roads are unfavorable to matrimony and increase of population." Seven of the most stalwart lads and beautiful lasses of Greece were sent each year to Crete to be sacrificed to the Minotaur; bad roads in America send thousands of boys and girls into our cities to the Minotaurs of evil because conditions in the country do not make for the social happiness for which they naturally yearn.

Thus we may hint at the greater, more serious, phase of the road problem. Beside it, the financial feature of the problem can have no place; the farm has been too much to the American nation, its product of boys and girls has been too eternally precious to the cause of liberty for which our nation stands, to permit a system of highways on this continent which will make it a place where now in the twentieth century foreigners, only, can be happy. The sociological side of the road question is of more moment today in this country, so far as the health of our body politic in the future is concerned, than nine-tenths of the questions most prominent in the two political platforms that come annually before the people.

William Jennings Bryan, when addressing the Good Roads Convention at St. Louis in 1903, said:

"It is a well-known fact, or a fact easily ascertained, that the people in the country, while paying their full share of county, state, and federal taxes, receive as a rule only the general benefits of government, while the people in the cities have, in addition to the protection afforded by the Government, the advantage arising from the expenditure of public moneys in their midst. The county seat of a county, as a rule, enjoys the refreshing influence of an expenditure of county money out of proportion to its population. The capital of a state and the city where the state institutions are located, likewise receive the benefit of an expenditure of public money out of proportion to their population. When we come to consider the distribution of the moneys collected by the Federal Government, we find that the cities, even in a larger measure, monopolize the incidental benefits that arise from the expenditure of public moneys.

"The appropriations of the last session of Congress amounted to $753,484,018, divided as follows:

"It will be seen that the appropriation for the Department of Agriculture was insignificant when compared with the total appropriations—less than one per cent. The appropriations for the Army and Navy alone amounted to twenty-five times the sum appropriated for the Department of Agriculture. An analysis of the expenditures of the Federal Government will show that an exceedingly small proportion of the money raised from all the people gets back to the farmers directly; how much returns indirectly it is impossible to say, but certain it is that the people who live in the cities receive by far the major part of the special benefits that come from the showering of public money upon the community. The advantage obtained locally from government expenditures is so great that the contests for county seats and state capitals usually exceed in interest, if not in bitterness, the contests over political principles and policies. So great is the desire to secure an appropriation of money for local purposes that many will excuse a Congressman's vote on either side of any question if he can but secure the expenditure of a large amount of public money in his district.

"I emphasize this because it is a fact to which no reference has been made. The point is that the farmer not only pays his share of the taxes, but more than his share, yet very little of what he pays gets back to him.

"People in the city pay not only less than their share, as a rule, but get back practically all of the benefits that come from the expenditure of the people's money. Let me show you what I mean when I say that the farmer pays more than his share. The