COUNTRY ROADS, 9-11 



per cent, interest on $30,000,000, a sum which would g-o far 

 toward telfordizing all the principal thoroughfares of the State. 

 But not only would there result this direct saving from good 

 gravel roads ; our farmers thus enabled better to meet the com- 

 petition of more fertile regions, lands now untilled would be 

 brought under profitable cultivation ; our railroads would become 

 more prosperous than now, for it is of the utmost moment to them 

 that the country roads be of good quality in the regions of which 

 they are the great outlets. Then there is all the social and pleas- 

 ure travel which would be rendered so much easier and more 

 delightful, and which only barbarians can regard as of no impor- 

 tance. 



But the great value of good roads, on a small scale, might be 

 also inferred from the great results they have produced on a large 

 scale ; and in order to stimulate yet further our zeal for such 

 roads, let us, for a moment, consider their past. There is little, 

 danger that our zeal will exceed the bounds of reason. 



The Carthaginians were the first systematic road-builders-.. 

 From them the Romans learned the art ; but they so far improved! 

 upon their appropriated knowledge, and applied it so extensively - 

 that they became the most renowned of road-builders in all time,, 

 the Incas of Peru alone contesting with them the palm. Their.- 

 main lines, straight almost as the flight of an arrow, with tLe sur- 

 face firm almost as granite itself, composed of lime and stone - 

 three feet thick, extended from the shores of the Atlantic to the- 

 banks of the Euphrates, from the frozen regions of the north to 

 the extreme limit of cultivation in Africa. Even in the far isle of 

 Britain these indefatigable workers built 2500 miles of their stone 

 road. Of these immense roads, which in part continue to this 

 day, and whose ruins, centuries after the power and civilization of" 

 Imperial Rome had vanished from her outlying provipces, were re- 

 garded by the rude and superstitious inhabitants as the work of 

 King Solomon, of genii or fabulous heroes ; — of these immense 

 roads the city of Rome was the great centre, and along them she 

 sent, with then unequaled celerity, her legions and the muniments 

 of war, to the very verge of the known world. To these roads, 

 says John Stuart Mill, and to her policy of incorporating con- 

 quered provinces into the body of the Republic, afterwards into 

 the body of the Empire, more than to the matchless discipline of 

 her armies, Rome, through so many centuries, was indebted for the 

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