of the
supplies. The section-line division may accomplish this or it may not,
and it is likely to place roads in wrong locations and to render the
country monotonous and uninteresting.

But in the broken country, in the country of tumbled hills and crooked
falling streams, of slopes that would better be left in the wild, and of
lands that are good and fruitful for the plow, the roads may go the easy
grades; but they ought also to go in such a plan as to open up the
country to the best development, to divide its resources in the surest
way for the greatest number of persons, and to reduce profitless human
toil to the minimum,--and this is just what they may not do. They may go
up over bare and barren hills merely to pass a few homesteads where no
homesteads ought to be, roads that are always expensive and never good,
that accomplish practically nothing for society. They leave good little
valleys at one side, or enter them over almost impossible slopes. There
are resources of physical wealth and of wonderful scenery that they do
not touch, that would be of much value if they were accessible. The
farming country is often not divided in such a way as to render it
either most readily accessible or to make it the most useful as an asset
for the people.

To connect villages and cities by stone roads is good. But what are we
to do with all the back country, to make it contribute its needful part
to feed the people in the days that are to come, and to open it to the
persons who ought to go? We cannot accomplish this to the greatest
purpose by the present road systems, even if the roads themselves are
all made good.

When the traveler goes to a strange country, he is interested in the
public buildings, the cities, and some of the visible externals; but if
he wants to understand the country, he must have a detailed map of its
roads. The automobile maps are of no value for this purpose, for they
show how one may pass over the country, not how the country is
developed. As the last nerve-fibre and the last capillary are essential
to the end of the finger and to the entire body, so the ultimate roads
are essential to the myriad farms and to the national life. It is
difficult in any country to get these maps, accurately and in detail;
but they are the essential guidebooks.

We undertake great conquests of engineering, over mountains and across
rivers and through the morasses; but at the last we shall call on the
engineer for the