Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 15).djvu/29

This page has been validated.
FUTURE OF ROAD-MAKING
25

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