"The estimated cost of hauling the corn, wheat, oats, potatoes, cotton, and hay crops of the country is annually $153,000,000. No one knows how much of that vast sum could be saved if motors were able to ply between the farm and the railroad station. Very few cities have compiled statistics. Some light is shed on the subject in a report prepared by the Chicago municipal markets--not so much on the influence of good roads as on the reduction in haulage costs, which is effected by self-propelled vehicles running on fine pavements. It appears that it costs eleven and one-quarter cents to carry one ton a mile by motor in the city of Chicago, and seventeen and three-quarter cents by horse. The average cost of delivering a package by the department stores, grocery stores, and meat markets of the city is approximately eight cents by motor and sixteen cents by horse for each mile. "Apply these figures to the cities of the entire country, and consider further that motor-trucks can deliver goods directly from the farm to the city retailer, and it seems not unreasonable to expect that the cost of living must at least be held stationary, if it is not actually reduced by the wider introduction of mechanical road vehicles. Surely, the horse must eventually disappear in our towns, at least, if the city consumer pays an average of one dollar and ninety cents for vegetables which the farmer sells for one dollar; if it costs more to haul by horse one hundred pounds of produce five miles from Chicago wharves to the householder or the retail store than to ship it by boat from the shores of Lake Michigan to Chicago; if it costs nearly half as much to deliver a ton of coal by horse from the railroad tracks to the business district of Chicago as it does to ship it four hundred miles by rail from southern Illinois to the city."--Waldemar Kaempffert in _Harper's Magazine_.