Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 September 1889 — Condition of our Roads. [ARTICLE]

Condition of our Roads.

Professor N. 8. Shaler, of Harvard, after a careful consideration of the much-neglected condition of the common roads in this country, makes the following suggestions in Scribner’s for October: “I would in the first place suggest that in the federal Department of Agriculture there should, be a commissioner of roads, having at his command sufficient means to prepare and print as public documents accounts of the condition of roadways in this co untry,with essays on the method of their construction. Each State should likewise have a commissioner of public ways, whose duty should be to advance education in this class of questions in every possible manner. To him the town |and country load; commissioners slfciuld be required to report. He should cause to be constructed a map showing the location and condition of all the rcadways in.-tlie State. These ways he should classify as regards their condition. Our country folk wallow in the mire or their ways, pay excessive tolls, endure, in a word, a grinding taxation, generation after generation, without appreciating the burden which rests upon them.”