Whatever shall tend to create a love for country life, to decrease the rush for the city, instil a desire to dwell in the society of nature, will make for the health, the happiness, the refinement, the moral and intellectual improvement of the people. Nothing will contribute more to this than the improvement of our common roads, to facilitate the means of communication between one section of the country and the other, and between all and the city." * * * * * Turning now from the high plane of the social and moral effect of good roads, let us look at the financial side of the question. Good roads pay well. In urging good roads in Virginia, an official of the Southern Railway said that if good roads improved the value of lands only one dollar per acre, the gain to the state by the improvement of all the roads would be twenty-five million dollars. Yet this is an inconceivably low estimate; lands upon improved roads advance in value from four to twenty dollars per acre. Virginia could therefore expect a benefit from improved highways of at least one hundred million dollars--more than enough to improve her roads many times over. Indeed this matter of the increase in value of land occasioned by good roads can hardly be overestimated. Near all of our large towns and cities the land will advance until it is worth per foot what it was formerly worth per acre. Take Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Beginning in 1880 to macadamize three or four miles of road a year with an annual fund of $10,000, the county now has over a hundred miles of splendid roads; the county seat has increased in population from 5,000 to 30,000. "I know of a thirty-acre farm," said President Barringer of the University of Virginia, a native of that county, "that cost ten dollars an acre, and forty-six dollars an acre has been refused for it, and yet not a dollar has been put on it, not even to fertilize it. Some of the farms five and six miles from town have quadrupled in value." In Alabama the same thing has been found true. "The result of building these roads," said Mayor Drennen of Birmingham, "is that the property adjoining them has more than doubled in value." That wise financier, D. F. Francis, President of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, when suggesting that Missouri would do well to bond herself for one hundred million to build good roads, said: "The average increase in the value of the lands in Missouri would be at least five dollars per acre." Taking President Francis at his word, the difference between the value of Missouri before and after the era of good roads would buy up the four hundred and eighty-four state banks in Missouri eleven times over. What President Francis estimates Missouri would be worth with good roads over and above what her farms are now worth would buy all the goods that the city of St. Louis produces in a year. In other words, the estimated gain to Missouri would