An execrable road system, besides bringing poor schools and poor churches, has rendered impossible any genuine community of social interests among country people. At the very season when the farm work is light and social intercourse feasible, at that season the highways have been impassable. To this and the poor schools and churches may be attributed the saddest and really most costly social revolution in America in the past quarter of a century. The decline of country living must in the nature of things prove disastrously costly to any nation. "The roar of the cannon and the gleam of swords," wrote that brilliant apostle of outdoor life, Dr. W. H. H. Murray, "is less significant than the destruction of New England homesteads, the bricking up of New England fireplaces and the doing away with the New England well-sweep; for these show a change in the nature of the circulation itself, and prove that the action of the popular heart has been interrupted, modified and become altogether different from what it was." In the popular mind the benefits of country living are common only as a fad; the boy who goes to college and returns to the farm again is one of a thousand. Who wants to be landlocked five months of the year, without social advantages? Good roads, in one generation, would accomplish a social revolution throughout the United States that would greatly tend to better our condition and brighten the prospect of future strength. President Winston of the North Carolina State College of Agriculture said: "It might be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that bad roads are unfavorable to matrimony and increase of population." Seven of the most stalwart lads and beautiful lasses of Greece were sent each year to Crete to be sacrificed to the Minotaur; bad roads in America send thousands of boys and girls into our cities to the Minotaurs of evil because conditions in the country do not make for the social happiness for which they naturally yearn.
Thus we may hint at the greater, more serious, phase of the road problem. Beside it, the financial feature of the problem can have no place; the farm has been too much to the American nation, its product of boys and girls has been too eternally precious to the cause of liberty for which our nation stands, to permit a system of highways on this continent which will make it a place where now in the twentieth century foreigners, only, can be happy. The sociological side of the road question is of more moment today in this country, so far as the health of our body politic in the future is concerned, than nine-tenths of the questions most prominent in the two political platforms that come annually before the people.