130 MISSOURI AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



his district would co-operate with him to inaug-urate these conceptions. 

 It is necessary that they should be united, hence a road system is a co- 

 operative institution. Being co-operative, it is a corporation. Every 

 road district is a corporation in so far as business is concerned and also 

 so far as law is concerned. Being a corporation, the people in the dis- 

 trict being the stockholders, the roads their property and the maintenance 

 of the roads their charge, then we turn and make the inquiry what bus- 

 iness principles govern corporations? Now is not this right? If you 

 will agree with me there, then you certainly will agree with me as we pro- 

 ceed. Corporations, bank corporations, mercantile corporations, all the 

 railroad and school corporations — because the school is a corporation — 

 all of them transact their business through the boards of directors. Don't 

 they? Therefore, we conceived the idea that a road system and the laws 

 governing a road system should conform to that idea and that there should 

 be for the management of the business of the road corporation, of the 

 road system, of the road district, a board of road commissioners or a 

 board of road directors. Now we have them. This law is called the 

 "commissioner law." Now the other system, the road district law where 

 caeh road overseer is appointed by the county court or elected, that sys- 

 tem is in direct violation to the business principles that enter into the 

 management of corporations. It does not conform, and hence that has 

 been one of the things that has been a drawback, a bar to progress in the 

 road management in the State of Missouri. 



Now let us go into an analysis of the road system. The road sys- 

 tem is necessarily a complex one, it embraces distinct features. There h 

 first the feature of the road system which is for the raising of revenue, and 

 under the laws of our State and under the proper management of things, 

 the raising of the revenue is taken care of by an ofificial board entirely dis- 

 tinct and in no way connected with any of the other affairs of the road. 

 In our State the County court or the township board in a township organi- 

 zation are the ones that take care of this feature of the road question. 



There is another division. We have the revenue to be collected by 

 those elected or appointed by the county court or by a board of township 

 officers. The other feature is the management of the business of the road 

 district. We call that supervision. The supervision has nothing to do 

 with the feature of revenue raising and it should not have anything to do 

 with it ; and we have a third feature which is separate from the other two, 

 which is the feature of road building or road maintenance. 



Let us make a comparison here between the school and the road sys- 

 tem, the parallel is quite close. We have first the raising of the revenu'e. 

 which must be attended to by the county court, which makes out the tax 

 bills and collects the money and places it to the credit of the district. The 



