CHAPTER XX.

PUBLIC IMPROVEMENTS.

"Civilization begins with commercial intercourse."

-M. M. von Weber in his "Railroad Technics."

THE fact, that the United States have never had a system of public improvements, which could be sustained on sound scientific, ethical or political principles, proves that something is wrong in our modes of forming a public will. With the experience of many centuries and nations before us, and entirely free to adopt the best, we have been vacillating in our policy, and selected one bad system after another!! Our projects have been vast and costly enough; for we have had a continent and the world's commerce ever in our eye, and have often felt giddy at the vast sweep of view we had. But in the carrying out of our schemes we lacked attention to details, had poor administrations, venal directions, and mercenary local motives, so predominating as to rob ourselves of the glory that shone out of our gigantic enterprises, and to subject us to the accusation, that with all our greatness we have much narrow-mindedness and fiscal littleness. Everybody was for public improvements; but nobody wanted them upon a rightful basis; and their advocacy in Congress and State legislatures, fell therefore into the hands of artful popularity-hunters; their administration into the hands of adventurers; and the end of it all was, what always happens, when false and inadequate means are employed, poor roads in bankrupt hands.

Will the reader, whom our remarks perhaps offend, please reflect, that here was a subject-public roads-which of all subjects, being beyond the capacities of individual procurement, has always been regarded as within the province of government, thrown out and assigned to corporations! Here was also an excellent federal organism, with public authorities that could each respectively attend appropriately to each branch of this public business. But instead of agreeing on their respective sphere, they disputed about it, and either asked one day each of the other, too much, or the next day denied each to the

other the powers, which they clearly possessed. They played politically blindman's-buff, and made those pay most, that should have paid least, and vice versa. The means that were close at hand, were disregarded, and those most distant and hardest to reach, were sought after and at great cost; which led, of course, to deplorable financial results. Plan after plan, system after system, was recklessly adopted, then again hastily abandoned, until the public mind was bewildered; and surrendered the whole subject to private enterprise. Now a reaction came, for it soon was seen, that too much was given up, and that the state had duties and rights in reference to the subject, which it must exercise, or there would be a permanent chaos. The people felt oppressed by the action of the corporations; they sighed for relief, and dreamed of some imaginary lost liberty. They clamored, and are clamoring, for arbitrary legislation, as if that were not adding new strife to the general conflicts of interests that perplex us.

Whenever the public mind gets stalled on the subject of public highways, we hear much of free roads, which means simply, roads for whose enjoyment nothing is to be paid by those who use them. But as there can be no good roads without somebody either paying for or working on them, and as the government would not organize proper administrations nor provide the right laws, it engendered a series of schemes for public improvements, in which sound financiers were out of place, and gamesters appeared to be a sort of necessity. The schemes had one general object, and it was, to deceive the public as to who ought and who actually did pay for the roads. The real estate-holders were told, that all they would subscribe for public improvements, would come back to them in a higher price for their lands or lots; and the lenders of money were promised an early return of principal and interest. To use a homely figure: we thought we could eat our cake twice. The roads were thus to be at nobody's expense; and as that was the fundamental conception of the primitive roads that lived in men's memories, the schemes were immensely popular. It looked as if modern finance had brought forward the primeval roads, that were supposed to be made by nature in the forests, whence the Fathers came a thousand years ago. How we admired our age! Did it not give us canals, turnpikes, and railroads, and all by only issuing bits of paper? The Romans constructed good roads; and levied no taxes for them, nor levied tolls; but they were, in the eye of the Germanic races, forerunners of subjugations, and as they hated these, they did not thank the Romans for their work; indeed, they hated the roads also. The free (?) rovers of the

north of Europe needed as few and as inartificial roads as our Indians, and for the same reason. They had no trade and no civilization. Good roads seemed facilities to enemies, not to themselves. They brought strangers into their countries; and was not the word stranger to a Hun, a Frank, a Goth, or a Saxon identical with enemy? Hence they abandoned to decay all

the fine roads Rome had constructed after the Romans were repelled, and they deemed themselves the free-er, the less accessible their habitations were to strangers. That conception of liberty is and was at the bottom of all the opposition to a rational and comprehensive system of public improvements in the United States. The Union was not allowed to do its duties as to the inter-state arteries of commerce; the states failed to do theirs as to inter-county lines of communication; the counties not theirs as to inter-township roads, and the townships neglected the byeways of the vicinage. Good private roads were the scarcest item of all.

When the Roman Empire had to relax its hold on northern Europe, all the public improvements the people, whom we now style Anglo-Saxon (really should be Indo-Germanic), and also the inhabitants of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland had, was, that they had as many ruts in their minds as they had in their roads: they disliked every species of artificial highway. The last-named countries had mostly a soil that dried up rapidly after rains, and roads might be said to be self-constructed and self-repairing; for they required but little grading, ditching, &c. We have in the American states a relic of the supposed lightness of the burthen these roads imposed, in the laws requiring but two days' work of every adult male for road purposes in each year. And to this day the body of the people regard every public thoroughfare, that costs more than that, either in work, or, worse yet, if it has to be paid by toll in money, as unfree roads. Up to 1820 roads were, in Ohio, made and repaired by two days' labor, worth about $1, 40c., for it was lazy labor. And such roads were the only highways in most of the American states for two centuries. Compare this with Switzerland, that has the best system of artificial roads (constructed and repaired by public authorities without toll) at an annual expense of $4, 20c. per head of the adult male population; and we have the difference between an intelligently economic state and our uneconomic American states fifty years ago. The former had almost no mud roads at all; the latter had nothing else. We may also reflect on the kind of reasoning there must be in people's heads, who regard a good system of improvements as modern tyranny, and bad roads as ancient liberty. The Nor

mans brought similar ideas to England as to improvements in watercourses. They had had for ages cheap ocean navigation, and they regarded every measure, that increased the cost of water intercommunication, as entrenching on their freedom. A canal would have looked to them as an obstruction to their free roving.

We may as well understand then, once for all, that good roads in France, Germany, and England, as well as in the United States, are not an innate want of the body of the people; that the public spirit, that has produced them, and is producing them, has come from the very Romanic races, that are looked down upon by us. What made Charlemagne and Alfred I. great was their carrying to northern Europe the civilizatory ideas they had learned in Rome, and the fact, that they rose above the native prejudices of the people. Their successors had less zeal and less knowledge, and ceased to lead as intelligently and energetically as these great kings; and, consequently, the nobles and the clergy slackened their efforts, and so the common Anglo-Saxons, Britons, and Germans remitted themselves back to their old freedom (?).

But in time cities sprang up and towns multiplied, and they disturbed the old rights of country people to be barbarous; for they created public improvements. The country people did not like it, and there grew up among them an anti-city rusticity, which we need not tell the reader, is still much alive in the United States. The romance-writers still cater to this feeling, when they depict, as the emblem of the most unadulterated and least infracted freedom, a country council-house, a log cabin or a rustic settlement, to and from which there are no roads but footpaths, or at most bridle-paths. The policy of having seats of government in the woods is a child of the same idea; and the opposition to granting to corporations, or to public authority, the right to expropriate and to condemn, for public uses, any real estate or land, has its inner animus from the same impressions.

It took half a millennium after the ninth century to revive anything like the old Roman spirit among the feudally oppressed nations, that were forming north of the Alps. And it was the post-office again, as it was under the Romans, that promoted this new growth. The foot-traveller and the horseman, as well as the mule-rider, were slowly superseded by common carriers and the use of public conveyances. From France came to England wagons called "coaches," in imitation of the French word coches, which were the pioneers of the subsequent French diligences. England was all the time a little behind. It took, in 1650, yet seven days to carry despatches from London to

Edinburgh, while in the better times of the Roman emperors regular mail facilities existed by land and over good roads between Paris and Constantinople in six days. England soon, however, overtook the French, and to-day the mail is conveyed by railroad to Edinburgh in nine hours. We can see in these three periods how far the public service had advanced among the Romans, how low it sunk in the Middle Ages, and how efficient it has now become. News from Constantinople to London go now hourly by telegraph in a minute or two; and the death of Abdul Assiz, the late Sultan, was known sooner in London than it was in the streets of Stamboul.

The introduction of the compass (Bussole) made a break in the primitive Norman ways of navigation; and soon England followed Spain, Italy, and Portugal in transatlantic movements; the locks, invented by Leonardo da Vinci in 1497, unlocked the canals, and France and England became through them a commercial people. Still roads remained more or less unimproved all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The emigrants, who came to the United States, up to our revolution, were not, what we would call, "internal improvement men." They knew little or nothing of turnpikes and canals, and the horse and saddle, often not even the latter, constituted the principal mode of intercommunication. The mails were chiefly carried that way; and ladies and gentlemen made their visits, and farmers and mechanics did their trafficking, in that way. Wagons, not to speak of coaches, were scarce. Braddock, the British general, had expected in 1760 to carry his supplies for his military operations with saddle-horses, but Franklin procured him teams with waggons, much to his relief. It was not until the nineteenth century (in 1812) that macadamized roads came into vogue, and as it was a sort of compromise between real good roads and mud roads, it took freely in America; indeed, some take it to have been an American invention. Five years previous Fulton had perfected steamboating. In 1801 was passed the first railway act in England, a horse railroad (Wandsworth-Crosdon); in 1823 George Stephenson projected the first locomotive railroad (Darlington-Stockton); and in 1838 ocean steam navigation became a fixed fact through the crossing of the Atlantic by the steamers Sirius and Great Western. In 1840 came penny postage; and since, the telegraph has added wings to thought. Commerce could now develop, in full, its great civilizing processes. It could foster the wide outlook, that takes in a world's wants, and seeks to provide for satisfying them; it could think of a vast interchange of the best products, so as to secure the highest compensation to all who produce