The road engineers of New Jersey find that they cannot follow old paths and make their roads after one style or pattern. Technical engineering in road construction must yield to the practical, common-sense plan of action. An engineer with plenty of money and material at hand can construct a good road almost anywhere and meet any condition, but with limited resources and a variety of physical conditions he has to "cut the garment to suit the cloth." We start out with this dilemma. We must have better roads, and our means for getting them being very limited, if we cannot get them as good as we would like, let us get them as good as we can. Let me give a practical illustration. Stone-road construction outside of turnpike corporations in West Jersey was begun in the spring of 1891. I was called on by the township committee of Chester Township, Burlington County, to construct some roads. Moorestown is a thriving town of about three thousand inhabitants in the center of the township. The roads to be constructed, with one exception, ran out of the town to the township limits, being from one-half to three miles in length. The roads were generally for local purposes. There were ten roads, aggregating about eleven miles. The bonding of the township was voted upon, and it was necessary, in order to carry the bonding project of $40,000, to have all these roads constructed of stone macadam. The roads to be improved were determined on at a town meeting without consulting an engineer as to the cost, etc., so that the plain question submitted to me was, Can you construct eleven miles of stone road nine feet wide for $40,000? The conditions to be met were these: There was no stone suitable for road-building nearer than from sixty to eighty miles; cost of freight, about seventy-five cents per ton; the hauls from the railroad siding averaged about one and three-quarter miles; price of teams in summer, when farmers were busy, about $3.50 per day. In preparation for road construction there were several hills to be cut from one to three feet; causeways and embankments to be made over wet and swampy ground. For this latter work the property holders and others interested along the road agreed to furnish teams, the township paying for laborers. The next difficulty was the kind of a road to build. As the width was fixed at nine feet as a part of the conditions for bonding, there seemed only one way left to apply the economics--that was, in the depth of the roads. On the dry, sandy soils I put the macadam six inches deep; this depth was applied to about six miles of road. On roads where the heaviest travel would come the roadbed was made eight inches deep. On soils having springs and on embankments over causeways the depth was ten inches with stone foundation, known as telford. Where springs existed, they were cut off by underdrains.