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 twenty-five cents per mile and over good roads about ten cents per mile, making a difference of fifteen cents per mile per ton. For five hundred tons, hauled from farms averaging ten miles distance, this would be seven hundred and fifty dollars per day, or a quarter of a million dollars a year—enough to build fifty miles of macadamized road a year. The farmers shift as much as they can of their heavy tax on the city people—the consumer pays the freight. Everybody is concerned in the "mud-tax" of bad roads.

And so what is known as the "state aid" plan has become popular. By this plan the state pays a fixed part of the cost of building roads out of the general fund raised by taxation of all the people and all the property in the state. Under these circumstances corporations, railroads, and the various representatives of the concentrated wealth of the cities all contribute to this fund. The funds are expended in rural districts and are supplemented by money raised by local taxation.

The state of New York, which has a good system, pays one-half of the good