_Mr. Chairman and my Fellow-Citizens_:
There is one matter which I think presses for national legislative
attention—the matter of the currency. From your sister State of Iowa
I have a Secretary of the Treasury, who, as he showed last fall,
can be counted on to act with courage and with wisdom whenever the
need arises, and to use fearlessly and coolly whatever the law now
allows him to use. Our currency laws have been recently improved
by specific declarations intended to secure permanency of values;
but this does not imply that these laws may not be further improved
and strengthened. It is wellnigh universally admitted, certainly in
any business community such as this, that our currency system is
wanting in elasticity; that is, the volume does not respond to the
varying needs of the country as a whole, nor to the varying needs of
the different localities as well as of different times. Our people
scarcely need to be reminded that grain-raising communities require
a larger volume of currency at harvest time than during the summer
months; and the same principle in greater or less extent applies to
every community. Our currency laws need such modification as will
ensure definitely the parity of every dollar coined or issued by the
government, and such expansion or contraction of the currency as will
promptly and automatically respond to the varying needs of commerce.
Permanent increase would be dangerous, permanent contraction ruinous,
but the needed elasticity must be brought about by provisions which
will permit both contraction and expansion as the varying needs of the
several communities and business interests at different times and in
different localities require.
AT ODEON HALL, ST. LOUIS, MO., BEFORE THE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL
GOOD ROADS CONVENTION, APRIL 29, 1903
_Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen_:
When we wish to use descriptive terms fit to characterize great
empires and the men who made those empires great, invariably one of
the terms used is to signify that that empire built good roads. When
we speak of the Romans, we speak of them as rulers, as conquerors, as
administrators, as road builders. There were empires that rose over
night and fell over night, empires whose influence was absolutely
evanescent, which have passed away without leaving a trace of their
former existence; but wherever the Roman established his rule the
traces of that rule remain deep to-day, stamped on the language and
customs of the people, or stamped in tangible form upon the soil
itself. And so passing through Britain fifteen centuries and over
after the dominion of Rome passed away, the Roman roads as features
still remain; going through Italy, where power after power has
risen, and flourished, and vanished since the days when the temporal
dominion of the Roman emperors transferred its seat from Rome to
Byzantium—going through Italy after the Lombard, the Goth, the
Byzantine, and all the people of the Middle Ages that have ruled that
country—it is the imperishable Roman road that reappears.
The faculty, the art, the habit of road building marks in a nation
those solid, stable qualities which tell for permanent greatness.
Merely from the standpoint of historic analogy we should have a right
to ask that this people which has tamed a continent, which has built
up a country with a continent for its base, which boasts itself,
with truth, as the mightiest republic that the world has ever seen,
which I firmly believe will in the century now opening rise to a
position of headship and leadership such as no other nation has ever
yet attained—merely from historic analogy, I say, we should have
a right to demand that such a nation build good roads. Much more
have we the right to demand it from the practical standpoint. The
great difference between the semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages and
the civilization which succeeded it was the difference between poor
and good means of communication. And we to whom space is less of an
obstacle than ever it was in the history of any other nation, we who
have spanned a continent, who have thrust our border westward in the
course of a century and a quarter until it has gone from the Atlantic
to the Alleghanies, from the Alleghanies down into the valley of the
Mississippi, across the great plains, over the Rockies to where the
Golden Gate lets through the long heaving waters of the Pacific, and
finally to Alaska, to the Arctic regions, to the tropic islands of the
sea—we who take so little account of mere space must see to it that
the best means of nullifying the existence of space are at our command.
Of course, during the last century there has been an altogether
phenomenal growth of one kind of road wholly unknown to the people of
an earlier period—the iron road. The railroad is, of course, something
purely modern. A great many excellent people have proceeded upon
the assumption that somehow or other having good railways should be
a substitute for having good highways, good ordinary roads. A more
untenable position can not be imagined. What the railway does is to
develop the country; and of course its development implies that the
developed country will need more and better roads.
A few years ago it was a matter of humiliation that there should
be so little attention paid to our roads; that there should be a
willingness not merely to refrain from making good roads, but to let
the roads that were in existence become worse. I can not too heartily
congratulate our people upon the existence of a body such as this,
ramifying into every section of the country, having its connections
in every State of the country, and bent upon that eminently proper
work of making the conditions of life easier and better for the people
whom of all others we can least afford to see grow discontented with
their lot in life—the people who live in the country districts.
The extraordinary, the wholly unheard-of, rate of our industrial
development during the past seventy-five years, together with the
good sides has had some evil sides. It is a fine thing to see our
cities built up, but not at the expense of the country districts.
The healthy thing to see is the building up of both the country and
city go hand in hand. But we can not expect the ablest, the most
eager, the most ambitious young men to stay in the country, to stay
on the farm, unless they have certain advantages. If the farm life
is a life of isolation, a life in which it is a matter of great and
real difficulty for one man to communicate with his neighbor, you can
rest assured that there will be a tendency to leave it on the part
of those very people whom we should most wish to see stay in it. It
is a good thing to encourage in every way any tendency which will
tend to check an unhealthy flow from the country to the city. There
are several such tendencies in evidence at present. The growth of
electricity as a means of transportation tends to a certain degree
to exercise a centrifugal force to offset the centripetal force of
steam. Exactly as steam and electricity have tended to gather men in
masses, so now electricity, as applied to the purposes which steam
has so long claimed as exclusively its own, tends again to scatter
out the masses. The trolley lines that go out into the country are
doing a great deal to render it more possible to live in the country
and yet not to lose wholly the advantages of the town. The telephone
is not to be minimized as an instrument with a tendency in the same
direction; and rural free delivery is playing its part along the same
lines. But no one thing can do more to offset the tendency toward
an unhealthy growth from the country into the city than the making
and keeping of good roads. They are needed for the sake of their
effect upon the industrial conditions of the country districts; and
I am almost tempted to say they are needed for the sake of social
conditions in the country districts. If winter means to the average
farmer the existence of a long line of liquid morasses through which
he is to move his goods if bent on business, or to wade and swim if
bent on pleasure; if winter means that after an ordinary rain the
farmer boy or girl can not use his or her bicycle; if a little heavy
weather means a stoppage of all communication not only with industrial
centres but with the neighbors, you must expect that there will be
a great many young people of both sexes who will not find farm life
attractive. It is for this reason that I feel the work you are doing
is so pre-eminently one in the interest of the Nation as a whole. I
congratulate you upon the fact that you are doing it. In our American
life it would be hard to overestimate the amount of good that has
been accomplished by associations of individuals who have gathered
together to work for a common object which was to be of benefit to
the community as a whole; and among all the excellent objects for
which men and women combine to work to-day, there are few indeed which
have a better right to command the energies of those engaged in the
movement, and the hearty sympathy and support of those outside, than
this movement in which you are engaged.