Story of the automobile: Its history and development from 1760 to 1917: With an analysis of the standing and prospects of the automobile industryBarber, H. L. (Herbert Lee)
History
Story of the automobile: Its history and development from 1760 to 1917: With an analysis of the standing and prospects of the automobile industry
Barber, H. L. (Herbert Lee)
Automobiles -- History
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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