GOOD ROADS. 6/ 



their wicked acts. The prisoner who has injured a community 

 by the commission of some crime and whose capture, conviction 

 and punishment have added to the burden, should, if possible, 

 in connection with his punishment, do something to benefit the 

 community which he has injured. And this principle is widely 

 accepted in the Southern States where the belief prevails that 

 perhaps the best way in which a criminal can benefit the com- 

 munity \\hich he has injured is in helping to improve the high- 

 ways. In doing this work without compensation, at a cost act- 

 ually less in many cases than that of his keep in the county jail, 

 thus benefitting his community without imposing on it an addi- 

 tional tax burden, he becomes a beneficiary, and like the sign of 

 the tramp placed along the highway it will serve as an indicator 

 warning him and others against the commission of crime, in the 

 states where such is practiced. The better would it be for the 

 county and the convicts if such were the law and practice in our 

 own State. 



A discussion of road improvement began in real earnest some 

 fifteen years ago, and within this time every legislature in New 

 England has been wrangling over the question. But few of 

 them have much to show for the time and labor spent in the dis- 

 cussion of so important a question, barring Massachusetts, for 

 she has appropriated and expended several million dollars in 

 building Telford and Macadam roads. 



The subject has been, and is being, extensively discussed and 

 the consensus of opinion is that we should build scientific roads. 

 For many years my own town appropriated annually fifteen 

 hundred dollars for the purpose of road repair in summer, a 

 sum large enough to pay the interest on a bonded debt of fifty 

 thousand dollars floated at three per cent. And this same fifty 

 thousand dollars would macadamize every public thoroughfare 

 in the town and give good and substantial roads forever, with 

 but little annual repairing. In place of this, fifteen hundred dol- 

 lars is expended in plowing and scraping into the center of the 

 road all the dirt possible, to be converted into mud in wet weather 

 and into dust in dry, as a recompense for money raised for road 

 repairs. And yet, for the sake of macadamized roads we woula 

 not recommend so rash an act in many of the towns of our State. 

 We must possibly forego the pleasure of such roads and content 

 ourselves with the old mud and dust roads, with an improved 



