BuEEAu OF Ageiotjltueb. 269 



store for the bare necessities of life in any other way than 

 on a mule, belly deep in the mire. Our boys and girls 

 simply will not be kept in the rural districts ten miles 

 from any town under such conditions, however much you 

 may talk about the noble life of the country. It is too 

 often the most lonesome existence on earth. If you wish 

 to live in the country and bring up your family around 

 you, if you wish them blessed by the things, which are 

 good and sweet in the rural life, then you must give 

 them the pleasant things of life in the city. Build good 

 roads to the city, you will lose none of the seclusion and 

 sweetness of the country. The sunshine and dew and the 

 landscape are still there, the fertile fields and the low- 

 ing herds, and the scent of new mown hay, and the silent 

 benediction of the evening still are yours. With good 

 roads and an automobile — if you cannot get an automo- 

 bile borrow a Ford — the wife and her boys and girls can 

 go to church, they can go to the fair, they can go to 

 places of amusement, they have the advantages of the 

 pleasures of the city, and you have not been deprived of 

 your country home or anything that makes it desirable 

 or lovely. You will never solve the question of "back 

 to the country" until you have made the country more 

 attractive. You cannot keep your family in the country 

 with ten or twenty miles of impassable dirt roads between 

 them and the things they want for nine months in the 

 year. 



Increase in Peospbeity. 



The country will be happier, more thickl;f inhabited, 

 if the roads are improved, and the city will find an in- 

 crease in prosperity whenever you unite the two by 

 macadam roads. 



Both political parties have condemned the contract 

 labor system. Both parties favor employing convicts 

 upon the roads. Now the counties have the right to em- 

 ploy whom they please with the money they raise them- 

 selves, and it is a vexed question to what extent the 

 State can force convict labor upon the counties, coming 

 as it must, more or less, in competition with free labor. 

 In Edmonson county, especially, we have an unlimited 

 deposit of rock asphalt, the finest road-making material 



