238 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



pie; let me for a moment draw your attention to another, to what 

 I may call a national and international consideration. You in this 

 country, like ourselves across the line, have been having uoex- 

 ampled prosperity of late. The wheels of industry have been run- 

 ning fast. It will not always be so. Stagnation will come, and 

 with it distress and social disturbances. In the olden days in other 

 lands the cure which wicked rulers sometimes sought for social 

 disturbances was foreign war. There is little fear, I trust, that 

 your rulers will ever seek such a remedy, for the lives of a loog line 

 of great and good Presidents have made it improbable that any but 

 a good man shall ever fill the position of Chief Magistrate of this 

 nation. [Applause.] 



We are dealing with a problem of transcendant national and inter- 

 national importance. If all the men and the millions engaged in 

 that greatest of all conflicts in your history could have been engaged 

 in improving the highways of the country, how much better it would 

 have been for this fruitful land to-day. And so we suggest to the 

 government of these great States that when men in this land of 

 varied resources ask for work they need not be without bread. Let 

 your governments spend the millions, the tens, the hundreds of mil- 

 lions which in other lands have been wasted in war in the promotion 

 of local improvements. Without displacing a day's labor in any 

 branch of industry, every unemployed man in the country could be 

 given work on your streets and highways. This would be no char- 

 itv, from which manlv men shrink. It would yield you dividends 

 a hundredfold in the profits on agriculture and every branch of com- 

 merce and industry dependent upon it. And beyond this you would 

 find a remedy for another ill, worse and harder to eradicate than 

 the misfortune of poverty. 



Instead of soup kitchens for the unemployed, give them honest 

 labor. Instead of wasting your resources in watching the lawless 

 element in your cities, or in keeping it in idleness in your jails, offer 

 it on public works, on national highways, the alternative of labor 

 or the lash. [Applause.] I submit with all seriousness that in the 

 development of the municipal. State, and national highways, in the 

 improvement of the streets of your cities, there is offered to you 

 the easiest, the wisest solution of some of the great and difficult 

 problems that confront you. And it is a solution that does not 

 involve the throwing away of money, but its wise investment. It 

 is expenditure which, while curing social and national ills, will 

 yield you an ample economic return. [Applause.] 



I have attended four great conventions in this country on behalf 

 of good roads. We are only beginning to attract attention. But 

 don't suppose that, because yon don't see much about our work in 



