ave done and are
still doing the best they can under the circumstances, there is great
need that their efforts should be supplemented, their revenues enlarged,
and their skill in the art of road construction increased.

The skill of the local supervisor was sufficient in primitive times, so
long as his principal duties consisted in clearing the way of trees,
logs, stumps, and other obstructions, and shaping the earth of which the
roadbed was composed into a little better form than nature had left it;
and the resources at his command were sufficient so long as he was
authorized to call on every able-bodied male citizen between twenty-one
and forty-five years of age to do ten days' labor annually on the road,
especially when the only labor expected was that of dealing with the
material found on the spot. But with the changed conditions brought
about by the more advanced state of civilization, after the rights of
way have been cleared of their obstructions and the earth roads graded
into the form of turnpikes, it became necessary to harden their
surfaces with material which often must be brought from distant places.
In order to accomplish this, expert skill is required in the selection
of materials, money instead of labor is required to pay for the cost of
transportation, and machinery must be substituted for the hand processes
and primitive methods heretofore employed in order to crush the rock and
distribute it in the most economical manner on the roadbed. Skill and
machinery are also required to roll and consolidate the material so as
to form a smooth, hard surface and a homogeneous mass impervious to
water.

The local road officer now not only finds himself deficient in skill and
the proper kind of resources, but he discovers in many cases that the
number of persons subject to his call for road work has greatly
diminished. The great cities of the North have absorbed half of the
population in all the states north of the Ohio and east of the
Mississippi, and those living in these great cities are not subject to
the former duties of working the roads, nor do they pay any compensation
in money in lieu thereof. So the statute labor has not only become
unsuitable for the service to be performed, but it is, as stated,
greatly diminished. In the former generations substantially all the
people contributed to the construction of the highways under the statute
labor system, but at the present time not more than half the populati