No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 429 



building of au ordinary pig pen, lie will take a piece of paper and 

 sketch out a plan; he will consider the question of materials, and 

 roughly estimate the cost; but in the matter of road making, in- 

 volving the expenditure of millions of days of labor and millions of 

 dollars of cash, the work is dooe without the slightest plans or 

 specifications. Each municipality, under its system of labor, selects 

 so many path masters at the beginning of each year, and those men 

 simply receive instructions to go on and use their best judgmeot as 

 to how the work shall be done, to get as much work as possible done, 

 and have it done in the best possible way. The result is that in 

 average townships there are some 75 path masters, and just 75 differ- 

 ent plans of road building, and each year these men are again ex- 

 changed for others, so that each year, under the labor-tax system, 

 plans are changed. One man who professes to know all about it 

 will say: "I believe in making a narrow road, and grading it 12 feet 

 wide." The next supervisor will say: '^You don't know anything 

 about the business, it should be 16 feet wide." The next one makes 

 it 20, the next 25, 30 or 40 feet. One man says it should be built 

 flat on the surface, and another says it should be crowned just 

 enough to shed the water. The third man says: ^'1 believe in sloping 

 her up,"' and he slopes it so that it is almost impossible for teams to 

 turn out. The following year other men are appointed with other 

 ideas, who tear down the work that has been built before them, and 

 this we call, in these enlightened days, a modern system of road 

 building. 



We talk about convict labor in the making of roads; but it occurs 

 to me in passing over some of these roads that convict labor has 

 been employed in the supervision of the work rather than doing it. 



To build good roads we must reduce this matter to a simple prop- 

 osition. I am an engineer by profession, but as a civil engineer I 

 do not profess to be a road maker. My knowledge of road building 

 comes most largely from the actual experience which I have had in 

 building roads. When I started out to get my first experience and 

 to build a road I thought I knew vastly more of the subject than I 

 do to-day, after nearly fifteen years of actual experience. The trou- 

 ble is that we all employ too much engineering knowledge and pro- 

 fess too much scientific knowledge of this problem. It is the sim- 

 plest possible problem, but how we do complicate it! The average 

 road supervisor makes the people believe that whatever he says must 

 be done, even if the road be destroyed. The testing of stone and 

 similar questions are irapertaut, but they will be solved by the 

 trained and experienced road maker when he comes in contact with 

 the work. We talk of bringing foreign material into our State and 

 of dealing with the railroads in this matter. These are all local 

 problems, which must be considered from the local standpoint pure 

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