WHAT THE PAPERS SAY. 257 



APPENDIX. 



CONTAINING SOME EECENT EXPRESSIONS OF PUBLIC OPINION 



ON THE SUBJECT OF BETTER ROADS AND ROAD 



MANAGEMENT. 



[From the " Boston Daily Advertiser," April 25, 1869.] 

 Probably the heaviest tax paid by the people of Massachusetts, 

 is that which they pay, in one form and another, for the privilege of 

 maintaining some of the worst roads in existence. At this season, 

 one may see anywhere in the country the full process of paying this 

 tax. Indeed, within ten miles of this city, where we are in the 

 habit of thinking that the arts of civilization are tolerably well un- 

 derstood, the traveller will find great county roads, like that leading 

 through Somerville to Medford, for example, over which there is 

 constant and important transportation, which are in such disgrace- 

 ful condition that they might reasonably be the subject of indict- 

 ment. Whoever complains will be informed that the trouble comes 

 from the frost and from the season ; but whoever takes pains to 

 learn how far we of New England are behind other parts of the 

 world — saving and excepting the rest of our own country — in the 

 art of road making, knows that the real trouble is that we neither 

 build our roads in the first place nor keep them in order afterwards ; 

 and that we thus continue to pay, directly and indirectly, a tax 

 which, if we could have it assessed in the regular way, would cause 

 a political revolution among us. 



Undoubtedly we should be obliged to make a considerable orig- 

 inal otitlay, in order to secure the drainage of our roads and their 

 construction of proper material. By drainage, we mean, of course, 

 not the " crowning " of the road and the digging of a ditch for sur- 

 face water, but the laying of proper drains under the road itself, so 

 as to keep the ground free from the moisture with which the frost 

 works its mischief; and by proper material we do not mean the 

 solid filling of gravel or even loam with which matters are now an- 

 nually made worse, but the broken stone, of various degrees of 

 coarseness, with which a road-bed is made permeable by water be- 

 low, and smooth on the surface. Certainly all this costs at the 

 outset. But the road built as the road makers of the old world, — 

 33* 



