No. 6. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 411 



here, but I tell you farmers that the agriculture of the future, yea, 

 und of the minute, must rally around its agricultural college. Let us 

 stand by that. I have seen too many men who have not appreciated 

 what is being done for the interests of agriculture, but I trust the 

 time is now here when there may be a better understanding, and 

 when our farmers will be convinced that that is what they want 

 to do. 



The CHAIRMAN: I have been very highly interested in what has 

 been said, but as we have here very high legal talent with us this 

 evening, I would like to hear something on this road question and 

 the road laws. 



MR. McCRACKEN: Mr. Chairman, I was going to say that we 

 all have our hobbies, as they have been suggested to me, by listening 

 to the several papers that have been read and the suggestions that 

 have been offered; but to my mind, the one thing that has made the 

 deepest impression upon my "thinking pot" was brought out by the 

 discussion of the road question. As the Chairman has just sug- 

 gested, if there ever was a people on God's earth anywhere that for 

 generation after generation was cursed with a curse that knew no 

 blessing, it was the people of Pennsylvania under the road system 

 we have lived under. It has been already suggested that after our 

 forefathers and ourselves have been living under this curse for 

 so long, the time has Anally rome w 7 heu it seems as though we were 

 about to launch upon a new era. 



I believe, Mr. Chairman, that now for the first time in the history 

 of Pennsylvania, we have the beginning of a system that is going to 

 make the Commonwealth a system of roads of which we may well 

 feel proud; but let us remember this fact, that in the building of pub- 

 lic roads, as in the building of anything else, there are certain fun- 

 damental principles that we must get dow 7 n to, and which, if we ad- 

 here strictly to, we will be led to success, but if we deviate from them, 

 w T e will be led to ruin. It is just the same in road building as in 

 anything else. 



Now what are some of these fundamental principles that first sug- 

 gest themselves? Before we can realize what the benefit of the new 

 law will be, we must fully realize what the details of that law are. 

 Now what has been the trouble with our old road system? It is this. 

 It was built — the roads were required to be built altogether by the 

 class of people who ought not to have built them at all. The bur- 

 den of building roads has been placed altogether on the farmers of 

 Pennsylvania, the men who use them the least, but I am glad that 

 under our new system on which we are entering, that another prin- 

 ciple is being recognized; that under our present law, that the State 

 stands ready, out of this big treasury that we have been talking 

 about, to contribute at least fifteen per cent, toward the building of 

 our roads. Now that is a step, my friends, in the right direction. 

 It is a step that is going in a very few years to enable the people 

 of the State of Pennsylvania to enjoy a system of good public high- 

 ways, and when that fifteen per cent, of the system has been in 

 operation a year or two in Pennsylvania, the people of Pennsyl- 

 vania will realize that it ought to be forty per cent., and they will 

 so make it, and in that way, when the public roads come to be built 

 and maintained by the public who use them, then we will have a pub- 



