428 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



ROAD MAKING FROM THE KNGINKER'S STAND- 

 POINT. 



BY HON. A. \V. CAllPBELTj, Deputy Minister of Public Works, Ontario, Canada. 

 Delivered before the luternational Good Roads Congress, Buffalo, Sept. 16, laOl. 



Mr Chairman and Gentlemen: I am sure that I am very glad to 

 have another opportunity of addressing the good roads people of 

 the United States. This is the third time, and I can assure you it 

 has always been a very great pleasure and delight to me to avail 

 myself of these opportunites and to listen to the vast amount of 

 most valuable information afforded by many of your experts at these 

 meetings. 



We very often, in meetings of this kind, see fit to aim at solving 

 the larger parts of the problem first, rather than taking up the 

 smaller parts, and the parts which, after all, are of the greatest im- 

 portance. The roads of our country are bad; the roads of the United 

 States, from what I have seen of them, appear to be equally bad, 

 and there is a good reason for this agitation. Roads are the one 

 class of public works which I think on this continent has been most 

 severely neglected, and very largely because we have always looked 

 upon it as being a question of such commonplace importance that 

 the business man, the man of knowledge and executive ability, 

 always fought shy of it. The result is that we have to-day no organ- 

 ization. As Professor Holmes has said, we have no plans, we have 

 no simple specifications. The work of road building in our country 

 previous to the agitation, as no doubt is the case in a great many of 

 your States, was being done without plans or specifications, without 

 reason or design. But, as he has said, the people allow the cold 

 machinery of taxation to take from their pockets each year many 

 millions of dollars, which is turned over to be expended by men who 

 have never given the question of road making the slightest thought 

 from a scientific standpoint. The better classes have always been 

 too busily engaged with other and more important questions, and 

 the result is we have never really taken the subject of road making 

 into serious business consideration. 



The first thing to do is to try and solve the problem of how best 

 to build a road. How should a road be built? If I were to ask 

 you now that simple question, I possibly would get fifty different 

 replies from the people in this audience. If a man undertakes the 



