1900.] ANNUAL REUNION. 137 



average conditions. If a road satisfied all our reasonable wants, 

 if it was to us shelter, clothing and food, including those luxuries 

 that have by use become necessities, then we might devote all 

 our substance to building what they call good roads. 



I grant some kind of a road is necessary to and is practically 

 a part of shelter, clothing and food to each of us because we are 

 used to them under civilized conditions. But what the State is 

 now doing in building roads in relation to these practical things 

 must come in the near future to be an oppression instead of an 

 advantage. A small fraction of the State expenditure thus far 

 has any place in practical economics. The building of roads had 

 much better be left to the counties and towns than such extrava- 

 gant expenditures which must be collected in taxes. 



The cost of keeping State roads in repair will be increasingly 

 burdensome to towns, and the State will have to do it and that 

 opens the widest conceivable door for waste if not corruption. 

 Within a few years electric roads will be running everywhere to 

 carry the farmer and his produce. 



Make your roads winding for the sake of beauty. There is 

 no beauty in a straight line. We are copying the artificial 

 things of Europe. 



What are the equities in the case ? A man goes in the country 

 and buys ten acres of land upon which to build a house, for the 

 price of a small house lot, a mile from the city hall. Is the 

 State morally bound to furnish the four people living on these 

 ten acres the same quality and area of road and sidewalk, street 

 cars, etc., expending the same amount of money collected from 

 all the people in taxes that it expends for the two hundred people, 

 more or less, living on ten acres within a mile of the centre of any 

 city. Of course the man who goes into the country to live does 

 so because there are certain advantages that he prizes over and 

 above the disadvantages that he suffers that he would have in the 

 city. Rather than what the State is now doing, it had better pass 

 a law of universal application, agreeing to pay from the State 

 treasury one-eighth of the cost of maintaining ail the roads in 

 the State ; the counties to bear one-eighth and the towns three- 

 quarters, all repairs to be done upon the approval of a local engi- 



