Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1880 — Highway Fences. [ARTICLE]

Highway Fences.

This subject is attracting considerable attention. What is justice to landowners and what to the traveling public? Are existing laws and usages just, or did they grow up under circumstances that seemed to justify them, but which have changed? Do these changes require or justify a change in the laws? If so, what? If the farmer does not himself need road fences, has society a right to make him build them ? If he chooses to “soil” his own cattle, or use his fields that border on the highway for grain fields or meadows, can the public require him to fence such fields along the highway to keep out their cattle? Between himself and his neighbor each farmer builds half of the line fence. Can you ask him to build more than half between himself

and the public? Can you require him to build any? Has the public any cattle and sheep? If so, should it not own a farm? Or is the whole highway the farm of the public? Each farmer buys (in most States) the highway bordering his farm. If his farm lies on both sides, he buys and owns the whole toad. The public, for good and sufficient reasons, reserves the right to travel on it. Does it reserve any other right? Has it any other that it can reserve? . Each farmer not only owns his highway land, but, in most States, pays taxes on it, just as on the rest of nu land. Not only that, but a part of his whole tax goes for road improvement. If he ‘‘ works out” his road tax, it is deducted from his tax total For his owning, tax-paying and working of his own highways, he receives a part of his equivalent every time he drives to town or city over the roads similarly owned and Kept in repair by other farmers and property-owners, and in a year he receives his rail equivalent. But if the public claims the right to use the highway as pig-pen or cow pasture, or for any other purpose than for travel and the necessary driving of stock, how can the individual farmer get his pay for this use of his land? Take another aspect:—ln general, the highways are now fenced. Most of the fences are now made so as to harbor huge snow-drifts in windy stretches of land, that often completely block the highway. Has the public right to object to this? Has it a right, as one correspondent, himself a farmer, suggests, to compel land-owners to build wire fences that will not harbor drifts? or, to give him the right, as another correspondent suggests, and as the New York law actually does, to lay his roadfences flat each fall, rebuild in spring* and commute, to the amount of the actual cost, for his next year’s roadtax? Has it a right to compel this? But thus to level and rebuild stone-wall or board fence would cost, in labor and damage, ten times the annual road-tax, and to level a hedge is to destroy it. Take still another aspect:—Suppose all road fences removed, as our correspondent suggests, and the ground cultivated on each side to the ditch that marks the line of actual necessary travel: can law keep the traveling public within those lines in muddy weather, or will men ride and drive on the less muddy turf of the adjoining meadows? Or, in summer, can cattle be driven on the highway without rushing through the grain fields and meadows that tempt them on either side? These and similar questions are doubtless ‘more easily asked than answered. One thing is certain: the burden of road-side fencing, and the waste of untilled, uncropped road-side land, are immense. They amount to millions of dollars each year. Has the law a right to perpetuate this burden and this waste, unless both are absolutely necessities?—Rural New Yorker.

—A spider is a glutton, as was evidenced by an experiment recently made. A gentleman arose at daybreak and supplied a spider, who had an extensive web, with a fly. This was 5:60 o’clock a, m., in September. The spider was then feeding on an earwig. He came for the fly, rolled him up, and returned to his first course. At 7 o’clock his earwig had been demolished, and the fly at 8 o’clock. At 9 o’clock he gave it a daddy-long-legs, which he ate at noon, At 1 he greedily seized a blow fly, and during the day he counted 127 flies or midgets, all dead and fast in his net.