390 FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 



township the regular highway commissioner should be authorized to act. 

 This special commissioner should engage an engineer, have a survey of the 

 road in question made, and ascertain what improvements are necessary, with 

 an estimate of the cost. This latter expense would rarely exceed fifteen 

 dollars per mile. The work of construction could be apportioned through 

 two or three years, if particularly heavy. After ascertaining the cost and 

 the amount to be done per year, the commissioner should make the assess- 

 ment exactly as highway work is assessed now, on all the property benefited 

 and in proportion to the benefit received. In making this assessment the 

 cities and the incorporated villages should not be neglected. They often 

 receive as much benefit from the improvement of the highways as the people 

 who live in the country, and it is but just and right that they should pay 

 some of the expense incurred. 



In conclusion, gentlemen, I cannot forbear urging some combination 

 which, keeping within the limits of the law, shall enable you to complete 

 some plan of road improvement. Whatever plan is adopted it will be found 

 more satisfactory to attempt to carry into practice no more than can be com- 

 pleted in a single year. If you intend to put on gravel exercise care and 

 judgment in preparing your foundation. Do not lay out more work than 

 you can possibly finish. There can be nothing worse to travel over than an 

 unfinished road, and as little time as possible should elapse between the 

 commencement and finishing of a piece of road work. Again, I say that our 

 road work needs above all things to be systematized. We want a plan for 

 our improvements ; we want to have an end clearly in view, and to accom- 

 plish that end we must make every day's work done in the district for years 

 count for something. The task of graveling the roads is a huge one, yet I 

 think that if a little is done every year, in the course of ten or twelve years 

 you would find your whole district covered with gravel, whereas our ordinary 

 year's work on the road gives us just about the same amount of permanent 

 improvement as money spent at a circus. I believe a plan of work extending 

 over a number of years could be laid out and carried into practice, by get- 

 ting together the people in a road district, adopting some plan, and insist- 

 ing that it be not altered until carried into effect. 



COUNTRY ROADS. 



BY J. K. PERRY. 



Read at the Flint Institute, Jan. 30, '89. 



That the present country road is out of date, all will admit, just what 

 change should be made is hard to say ; I would suggest, first, the town- 

 ship system should be done away and substituted with a county system, so 

 as not to have highway overseers and forty pathmasters, elected every year 

 by the rabble at the annual town meetings, to oversee so many little road 

 districts. 



There should be three road commissioners elected in every county for a 

 term of at least five years, who should have absolute supervison of all roads 

 in the county and then the work should be let on contract for a term of 

 years. In this way we would have the work done by intelligent, responsi- 

 ble parties who would have teams and tools to do the work in a proper man- 



