18th Nov.
"Tr will astonish a great many persons to learn," says Harper's Weekly, " what a crushing mass of iniquities and drawbacks to. civilisation may be logic cally piled up on the account of bad waggon roads." This refers not. to China or some other benighted eastern or southern land but to the United States, the country which claims and Bad on many grounds claims justly to be in the forefront of civilisation. All who have travelled in the United States know that in many of the cities and throughout the country the roads are disgraceful. It has been the misfortune of the Americans that they imported their civilisation in patches,-and while the old countries of Europe passed gradually from tracks to roads and from roads to railways, the Americans had hardly begun to connect their villages and towns with tracks when they imported railways, and the intervening condition of roads they have omitted altogether. To this day the man who walks from one place to another along the railway in the States calls it the track. While there is no excuse for the execrable paving of some of the older cities in the States, there is plenty of excuse for the want of roads. Even when the original thirteen States were comparatively thickly settled, they were never rich, and road-making is very expensive, and demands much labour while as the settlers pushed westward, the distances between each settlement, farm, or village or town, were so great that the expense of making roads and the difficulty of getting the necessary labour were prohibitory. The prairie indeed offered natural roads, and when the track was too much worn in one place, the traveller had only to go a little to the side. But the real difficulty in a poor or thinly settled country is the expense. 'I'he great main roads in England were made by the Romans, just as we have made the great highroads in India, for strategic purposes, a military administration thinking nothing of expense where the safety of its command is in question.
A country that jumps from tracks to railways has to go back to roads, and this is the position in which the Uniied States now are. They would perhaps have gone on bearing the ills they have, and building their waggons and cam: to suit their tracks, but for the widespread adoption of the bicycle as a means of recreation and amusement. The wheelman must have roads; they can negotiate tracks if necessary, but to enjoy cycling they must have roads. It is the wheelman who have roused the United States to a sense of their shortcomings, and now we find such a representative journal as Harper's Weekly calling the absence of decent roads in progress, but a blot upon our national character." The movement to get better internal highways, we are told, " is called an uprising against the bondage, which is upon the people that are hampered by. poor means of communication—a protest against a tax indirectly placed upon every article of consumption." The tendency of population toward the cities, the abandonment of farms, and even the modern development of slums, are largely ascribed to bad roads, which are said to be worse and more numerous here than in any other civilised country.
roads, it is argued, cause schools and churches to be neglected, prevent social intercourse in the country, and make life in the rural districts cheerless, isolated, and narrow."
When our American cousins do take up a grievance of any kind and make up their minds to have it redressed, they take it up with almost resistless energy. There are no people: in the world more tolerant of oppression and misgovernment up to a certain point, but they kick forcibly when they feel that it is the last straw; and those interested in the improvement of the highways of the United States have now prepared a memorial to the U.S. Congress on the subject of a Comprehensive Exhibit of Roads, their construction and maintenance, at the coming World's Fair at Chicago. Of this memorial Mr. Albert A. Pope, of Boston, Mass., the originator of this movement, has sent us a copy. He fortifies himself with some hundred pages of opinions from prominent statesmen and journals in the States. To us Englishmen, who regard good roads as being as indispensable as good houses, this seems a superfluity of consent; our views find expression in the following extract from a latter from Governor Reynolds of Delaware:—"A volume would be too limited to tell the endless blessings of good country roads and the loss and worryment of bad ones. I will say, however, I regard the public highways of any country as much a for people, and her people may be ex-art of that country as ier laws and poe to prosper in proportion as she ceps her roads in perfect order." It is a novel idea, as one of Mr. Pope's correspondents remarks, to have a building at the exposition devoted. exclusively to road-making. Under the. existing scheme those who wish to learn at Chicago all there is to be learnt on the subject, will have to visit five separate departments, " five enormous buildings having with their annexes an aggregate area of seventy-nine and three-tenths acres." They will have to visit the Agricultural Building for knowledge of road construction, fencing and paving; the Building of Mines and Mining for materials, natural and artificial; the Machinery Building for street rollers, sweepers, and sprinklers; the Transportation Building for systems of drain-and road-keeping plant; and the manufactures and Liberal Arts Building
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.