BENEFITS CONFERRED BY THE AUTOMOBILE.
That the automobile is one of the greatest boons to mankind will
probably be admitted if all its benefits are fully understood.
The best teacher, it has been demonstrated, is one’s own experience. In
learning anything, the mind can never grasp the lesson it is told, with
the same understanding it receives when the lesson is visualized by the
eye.
Travel is acknowledged to be a good educator and to broaden the mind.
This is because the eye sees and takes its own impressions, and does
not depend on the impressions of others. Reading books of travel never
instruct as does travelling itself.
The automobile is a healthful, exhilarating method of conveying people
to persons, places and scenes that, before the automobile, they knew of
only by hearsay, or by reading of them.
To estimate the extent to which this informs and instructs, we need
only go back in memory to the isolated farm of a quarter of a century
ago, and vision the limited horizon of the general knowledge at first
hand of the farmer’s family. Practically all the current knowledge they
had was from reading, occasionally going to town or through visitors
whose appearance was rare and made at long intervals. Seeing a new face
in those days was a rarity.
The situation with a majority of the people in the country, before the
automobile, was very much like the isolated farm family. It was like
that of the entire country before the advent of the railroad.
No greater agencies for instruction in first hand knowledge than the
railroad, the steamboat and the telephone had been introduced into
civilization up to the time of the automobile. Now the motor car
penetrates into places where the railroad, the steamboat, or even the
telephone does not go.
MEDIUM OF DISTRIBUTION OF KNOWLEDGE.
Exchange of ideas between people is the life of wider knowledge, as the
exchange of commodities is the life of world trade, and the automobile
is the medium of exchanging information as money is a medium of
exchange of commodities.
From time immemorial the greatest advancement of the human race has
been made in groups; and the larger the groups, the higher the thought,
and the more progressive the accomplishments have been. Big cities have
surpassed small towns; small towns have been in advance of the country.
The reason for this is the greater opportunity afforded by numbers
for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. The citizen of Rome or of
Venice had the advantage of personal contact with numbers of citizens
which the isolated rural Latin was denied, as the citizen of London,
Paris, New York or Chicago has, before his own eyes, the thought and
achievements of millions which the citizens of the country only hear of
or read about.
The railroad first enabled the resident of the country to go to the
small town, and the resident of the small town to go to the big city,
and by personal contact gather the fruits of himself seeing the results
of community or group work, which, before, had been monopolized by his
city brother.
The automobile supplements this work of the railroad, and is even
more widespread as it enables more frequent visits to be made, and
penetrates regions the railroad does not reach. What was a frontier is
now a suburb, while the suburb has become the downtown. The motor car
has opened up the far reaches as nothing else has done.
Bigotry and prejudice are the fruits of ignorance. Where knowledge is
they will not abide. In enabling people to acquire knowledge in their
own way—the way that most impresses knowledge on them—the automobile
is changing the thought and the habits of the denizens of the entire
country. It is broadening the human mind, by giving it a solid
foundation to work on.
In the courts of law, among judges, lawyers and court attendants, it
is notorious that no two witnesses ever testify exactly to the same
set of facts. There is a variation of detail, and many times there has
been such a difference in the statement of material facts that the
dispensing of exact justice has been defeated.
This condition is ascribed to the fact that few people are trained
observers. The automobile is correcting this popular defect more than
any other one agency—by education. It is educating people to exact
observation and precise knowledge.
LIBERALIZING THE PEOPLE.
The automobile is a factor in creating open minds. When one travels
extensively, notions and prejudices, based on false conceptions, are
amended and revised by observance of the facts. In this respect the
automobile is conferring on the masses a benefit which, before its
advent, was confined to the classes. Time was when broad and liberal
views were generally the possession of the rich, who alone could afford
to indulge in contact with their fellows many miles distant. Now the
automobile has aided in making broader views the possession of anybody
able to own a motor car.
The degree in which the social life of the world has been benefited
by the automobile is the favorite theme of the enthusiast on the
automobile’s advantage to mankind. This phase of the automobile’s value
is of less importance than is its benefit in informing and enlarging
the horizon of the mind, but the social advantages which the use of
the motor car confers are not to be underrated in an age when the most
favorable mental conditions are recognized as of equal importance to a
desirable physical state.
The happiness of the human race is added to by social enjoyment, and
the automobile is a most important link between isolation and human
intercourse. It has rendered the means of communication between
people so easy and pleasant that it has encouraged and increased
their association. Everybody is brought into greater accessibility
to everybody else. The farmer with his family can visit his neighbor
farmer and his family, many times now to once formerly.
What was formerly a long, arduous journey taken at the expense of
pleasure as well as of time, is now an exhilarating spin. The farmer’s
wife and daughters can now go to town more frequently, and multiply the
number of their visits to friends. The automobile is the emancipator of
the farm woman, bringing the scope of her activities out of the narrow
circle of routine drudgery and monotony into the larger circle of
inspiring activities.
Farm women’s clubs have been given an impetus, through the fact that a
woman may attend one in the afternoon with the assurance that by the
use of the automobile she can return home in sufficient time to get
dinner, which she could not do by the use of the horse.
FACTOR IN PROMOTING SOCIABILITY.
The city man’s wife in the suburbs can visit her friends oftener
and more quickly, and the facility of speedy movement has given to
suburbanites the benefit of the last acts at the theatre and the opera,
whereas, before the automobile, they missed them in order to catch the
last train.
The benefit of clergy has been immeasurably enhanced by the automobile,
which, also, in addition to being itself an educational agent, has
employed its speed and facilities in economizing time to increase the
attendance in the schools. There are districts in the United States
where children can not reach school in time without the use of the
automobile.
What the automobile does for the city dweller, in enabling him to see
the last act at the theatre or hear the last act of the opera, it does
for the people of the farm in enabling them to spare the time to attend
dances, sociables, entertainments and motion picture shows. Where
formerly the time required to drive a horse made it impossible to spare
the time, now time is scarcely a factor. The change must inevitably
react to the advantage and benefit of humanity, if all work and no play
makes Jack a dull boy.
The health advantage of the automobile is a subject on which there is
a difference of opinion among medics. The ordinary layman, however, is
disposed to cast his verdict in its favor in this respect also. Some
physicians have expressed the opinion that the only respect in which
the automobile is noticeably not a benefit is in the matter of health.
Some of them think it does not give people enough exercise, and that at
the rate its use is increasing it will not be long before man loses his
ability to use his legs!
It would be a catastrophe indeed if the human race, through the
automobile, reverted to the condition when primitive man, according to
the Darwinian theory, swung by his hairy arms from tree limb to tree
limb, using his feet only as a stabilizer. But nobody, unless a writer
for a newspaper Sunday magazine section, is likely to maintain this
seriously, and he only pretends to be serious.
Whatever man loses in disuse of his legs by riding, as compared with
walking, may be said to be made up for by his use of them on levers of
automobiles and in the other exercise or operation of a car. The fresh
air and the sunlight—the great outdoors—are the big health factors in
motoring, and man will go on taking a chance to experience these and
other delights the automobile has to give.
AS AN ELEMENT IN EUGENICS.
And as still further offsetting the possibilities of decay of the human
legs, which certain physicians predict, more constructive medical men
have discovered that automobiling is becoming a factor in one phase of
eugenics. It may not receive endorsement as a benefit in all eugenics
as long as the charge can be made that since the use of the motor
car the birthrate in Kansas has decreased, the discoverer accounting
for this alleged fact on the theory that the expense of keeping an
automobile discourages Kansans from assuming the expense of large
families, but in one direction it is attempted to prove that the breed
of certain Americans is being improved by the automobile, and in this
way:
In certain parts of the country, particularly the Southeastern states
close intermarriage is said to have been, in part, due to the inferior
facilities for transportation, before the automobile came into use.
Young men, it is said, courted and married their sweethearts, in the
days when the buggy was king of local communication, within an average
radius of five to ten miles, which accounted for people in those
sections being cousins or otherwise related to one another.
Now that the automobile makes a thirty-mile or fifty-mile radius the
equivalent of the five-mile or ten-mile buggy radius, the swains are
seeking mates further afield, thus getting away from alliances with
relatives, and there is a consequent decrease in the mixing of blood
strains.
If this is true, tally one more in the score of benefits for the
automobile, for it is the verdict of science that intermarriage between
those of the same blood does not produce the best types, any more than
does the interbreeding of other animals.
But in enumerating the benefits of the automobile its economic value
easily comes next in importance to its service in imparting knowledge.
Its health value may be a matter of difference of opinion, and its
social benefits are comparative, but there can be no dispute about its
educational value, and still less about its economic worth.
The factor time has taken on a new meaning and significance with the
automobile’s accomplishments in speed. Time is a vital element in
the affairs of life. If the automobile’s educational value can be
expressed by the adage, “Seeing is believing”, its economic value can
be similarly expressed by the adage, “Time is money”.
PART PLAYED IN ECONOMICS.
Time is likewise life under some circumstances, and because of this
fact, the professional men who were first to make practical use of the
automobile were physicians, commandeering it in behalf of life itself.
How many lives have been saved by the automobile, which would have
been lost through the slow going gig or phaeton, it is not possible to
say, because there is, of course, no exact record, but the number is
large. The mortality of today among people is greatly reduced from that
of twenty years ago. The advance of science has, of course, brought
this about, but the automobile is an important instrument of medical
science, just as are the X-ray, the stethoscope and the pulmotor.
And the same cause—the element of time—which operated in the adoption
of the automobile by the physician to the human body, has forced the
veterinarian to use the automobile. This is irony—for the horse—and
another nail in the equine coffin, but it is at the same time another
demonstration of the automobile’s superiority in efficiency over that
animal.
The farmer demands that the veterinarian shall come in an auto to
attend his sick horses or cattle, because he will not take the chance
of death through delay. And this is scarcely gratitude—by the farmer to
the horse—but it is economic pressure.
At every turn in the road of the automobile’s advance, we see its
economic value. We see in cities that the big department store is able
to cut down its delivery expense from $990 to $350 a day by using a
fleet of motor trucks instead of horse drawn wagons; that coal, ice,
groceries, feed—practically all commodities in cities—can be delivered
by motor trucks at a large saving of cost. Contractors, plumbers,
plasterers, tinners, and craftsmen in substantially all lines,
have figured it out and concluded that with the facilities of the
automobile available, the horse is a distinct economic waste in their
businesses.
The possibilities of similar economy by the farmer in the substitution
of motor power for horse power have been indicated by many progressive
farmers who have by experiments demonstrated that the cost of hauling
and cultivating with motor wagons and machinery is less than by using
horses, but the general economic saving by the use of the motor vehicle
in hauling cannot get its fullest and conclusive demonstration until
better roads are more numerous. Where roads are nearly perfect, results
have shown the cost of horse hauling to be 30 cents a ton, against 14
cents a ton by motor truck, by the mile, figuring everything.
INFLUENCE IN GETTING BETTER ROADS.
By far the direction in which the automobile has forced on conviction
most strongly its economic potentialities, is in the matter of better
roads. No greater tribute to the educational value of the automobile
could have been paid than was paid to it by President Wilson when he
signed the Federal Good Roads bill which puts $85,000,000 of national
money against an equal amount by the states, into making better
highways. It was the popular demand for better roads, following the
general use of the automobile, that gave the country the improvements
made in roads in the last fifteen years, and it was the demand from the
same source for more of these improvements that resulted in the Federal
Good Roads law.
Until the coming of the motor car the good roads issue possessed little
vitality. For seventy-five years the Federal government exercised a
passive policy toward building permanent highways. Railroads pushed
into virgin territory, cities sprang up along the right of way, but the
rural arteries of travel remained in the same hopeless condition as
when the pioneers waded through them afoot or on horseback.
With the first motor car came the first feeble impulse to the good
roads movement. The first cars were sold to city men, who very quickly
found out that where city pavements ended, there ended all hopes of
further travel. Pneumatic tires availed nothing against trackless
stretches of gumbo mud or corduroy roads. With the mechanical
improvements in motor cars, the owners chafed at their limitations and
demanded better state roads.
As a result of the agitation, many states have become active in
promoting their own road systems, and quite a little has been
accomplished in some localities; but the sum total of improved roads
in the United States today is only 250,000 miles out of a total of
2,275,000 miles of roads. The Federal roads bill will give an impetus
to state work on roads, and as its appropriation covers the next five
years, 1922 should see a large increase in the miles of improved roads
in the country.
The results in benefit to the agriculture of the country in a general
system of good roads, will be most felt through the facility it
will give the farmer in marketing his products. With the aid of the
motor truck, the farmer may be able to meet, in many cases, the
congestion-of-freight-by-railroad problem.
Adding to its other benefits, the automobile promises to be an element
in the reduction of the high cost of living, and if it does aid in this
it will be in two directions, first, as a freight carrier, and, second,
by displacing the horse.
FACILITATING THE PASSING OF THE HORSE.
A horse, it is estimated, consumes each year the production of five
acres of land. There are 21,000,000 horses in the United States, and
therefore the fertility of 100,000,000 acres is enlisted annually in
behalf of this animal. If this area, which is as great as Ohio, Indiana
and Illinois combined, were released from this burden, and the products
were human food, a very large addition would be made to the food
stuffs of which the world is in such sore need.
The elimination of the horse is progressing at a very rapid rate
in cities, and the prediction is made that it will come to an end
ultimately in the country, and that a horse in future will be only a
pet or an element in sport. Thomas A. Edison has decreed the horse’s
life for practical, general use, to be only ten years. Those who
foresee his passing on the farm say that automobile engineers are
working on small tractors which will be practicable in the cultivation
of farms as small as 60 acres, and that they will ultimately be gotten
down to a price which will not exceed the original cost and upkeep of a
horse, and will do more and better work in the field.
The list of benefits conferred by the automobile is incomplete, if its
use in war is omitted. It has been said that it saved France twice
during its latest war. When the onrush of Germans in 1914 brought them
almost within sight of Paris, General Gallieni, then Governor of Paris,
rushed troops by the thousands in motor vehicles to the aid of General
Foch. They turned the tide and made possible the victory of the Marne.
Motor trucks saved Verdun. The German advance had cut the French
railway connections. Horse drawn wagons never could have brought the
supplies. Motor trucks did. Had there been no such things as motor
trucks, nothing, it is claimed, could have saved Verdun.
In war or peace, then, the automobile is a factor. As an agent in the
advance of civilization it occupies a secure place. It has doubled the
population of at least one city, and has given new life to others.
In forcing good roads it has enhanced the value of agricultural land.
It is a well settled fact that the increase in selling price of farm
lands through good main market roads is from one to three times the
cost of the road improvements.
The likelihood is that with the increased use of the automobile,
benefits from it will multiply. These benefits are, naturally, not as
great with only three and a half million automobiles in use as we can
well imagine they would be with the use of the motor car practically
universal for passenger, hauling and farm cultivation purposes.
Much bigger things for the automobile than it has yet accomplished can
be safely predicted.