. St. Nicholas [serial]. tates will be a country of good roads. But an enormous amount of work will have tobe done, and a vast sum of money will have tobe spent, before our roads will be as good as theyought to be, or as good as the roads of mostEuropean countries actually are. There are inthis country nearly 2,500,000 miles of publicroads. Of this total, about 250,000 miles con-sists of improved, surfaced roads. So, for everymile of good roads we have eight or nine milesof bad ones. In some of the States the propor-tion of improved roads is much greater than Massachusetts more than ha
. St. Nicholas [serial]. tates will be a country of good roads. But an enormous amount of work will have tobe done, and a vast sum of money will have tobe spent, before our roads will be as good as theyought to be, or as good as the roads of mostEuropean countries actually are. There are inthis country nearly 2,500,000 miles of publicroads. Of this total, about 250,000 miles con-sists of improved, surfaced roads. So, for everymile of good roads we have eight or nine milesof bad ones. In some of the States the propor-tion of improved roads is much greater than Massachusetts more than half, and in Indiananearly half, of the public roads are surfaced. I9i6.] A REVIEW OF CURRENT EVENTS 457 Since one mile of good macadam road costs any-where from $3,000 to $10,000, it will require bil-lions of dollars to put all our roads in goodcondition. Yet, costly as good roads are, thepeople are meeting the expense in a free-handedmanner, and are spending each year more than$250,000,000 on roads. This is about half as. visits the locality and supervises the constructionof a short stretch —a few hundred yards or afew miles —of road built in a manner that bestsuits the needs of the community. This servesas an object-lesson for the local the building of these object-lesson roads theOffice furnishes the engineer, but the local com-munity furnishes all mate-rials, labor, and supplies. While Uncle Sam is al-ready doing a great deal forroad improvement, manybelieve that he is not doingenough —that the NationalGovernment should furnishmoney not only for the su-pervision of road-building,but also for the actual con-struction. Accordingly, inJanuary, the House of Rep-resentatives voted in fa-vor of a bill appropria-ting $25,000,000 for roads. GOING TO SCHOOL OVER ABAD ROAD. much as is spent for publicschools, but it is money wellspent, for good roads areamong the most valuableassets of a nation. In the work of road im-provement Uncle Sam islending a helping hand
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