Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 15).djvu/27

 tages where now they have but this one. Like rural delivery it may seem impracticable, but in a short space of time America will leap forward in the front rank of the nations in point of good highways.

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