include a playground, bandstand, and whatever features are desired, even if it is necessary to place it at the edge of the village. Wherever possible the playground should adjoin the school building or community house, or both. Either as a feature of the playground or adjoining it, there should be a baseball diamond and bleachers or grandstand. Such a civic center will be found to be a powerful factor in the maintenance of community pride and loyalty.[89] The growth of automobile touring has encouraged the provision of camping sites for tourists on the edge of the village. Wherever a suitable grove or other natural setting can be found nearby a village it should be reserved as a public picnic ground or park. A part of this might also be made available for a tourists' camp, and often it will be a good location for a ball diamond. There has recently been a steady growth of interest in community fairs and such a picnic ground or park might well be arranged with an open space adjoining it for fair and festival purposes. These general features and facilities of the village plan are not simply for the advantage or beautification of the village, but they benefit the life of the whole community and should be considered as features of the community's plant. When we leave the village center and survey the farming area of the community, the most fundamental feature of its structure is the road plan. In hilly regions the location of roads is necessarily largely determined by topography, but over most of the Middle West the roads were laid out on section lines at the time of the original surveys and their location has never been changed. One who has grown up in that section feels a sort of pride in the straight roads and looks askance at the crooked roads of the East, but as a matter of fact the latter are in many cases much better located as regards their utility, for they were laid out to reach certain centers by the most direct route. On the other hand, the location of the village centers of the Middle West was largely determined by the railroad stations, and the roads were located without regard to them. As a result it is almost always necessary to traverse two sides of a square in order to reach the community center. This means that such a route is forty percent longer from the corners of the community than it would be by a straight line. This was bad enough with dirt roads, and if all the roads could be hard-surfaced, the automobile would, of course, lessen the time required for travel. It is, however, economically impossible to improve all minor roads and with the high cost of macadam, concrete, brick, or other hard-surface, not only for original cost but for upkeep, it seems absurd to continue to build the main roads on rectangular lines rather than by the shortest route between the most-traveled points. The saving in cost of construction and maintenance would much more than pay for the cost of all land which it