It was a group of soldier-roadmakers who brought me to my senses. They were making a new road through the fields, and it branched off from the one I was on. I saw its crude beginning and considered the burdens it would soon have to bear. As I stood watching these English roadmakers my mind wandered down the avenues of time, and I saw the Roman soldiers building their immortal roads through England. They were joining town to town and country to country. They were introducing the people of the North to those of the South, and bringing the East into fellowship with the West. I saw come along their roads the union of all England followed at, some distance, by that of England, Scotland and Wales; and I regretted that there was no foundation on which they could build a road to Ireland. I saw on those soldier-built roads, also, Christianity and Civilization marching, and in the villages and towns by the wayside they found a home whence they have sent out missionaries and teachers to the ends of the earth. "The captains and the kings depart." The Roman Empire is no more, but the Roman roads remain. They direct our modern life and business with an inevitability the Roman soldiers never exercised. In two thousand years the Empire may have fallen apart and become a thing of the past; but the roads her sons have built in France, these two-and-a-half years, will abide forever and be a perpetual blessing; for, of things made by hands, there is, after the church and the home, nothing more sacred than the road. The roadmaker does more for the brotherhood of man and the federation of the world than the most eloquent orator. The roadmaker has his dreams and visions as well as the poet, and he expresses them in broken stones. He uses stones as artists use colors, and orators words. He touches them--transient as they are--with immortality. A little of his soul sticks to each stone he uses, and though the stone perishes the road remains. His body may perish more quickly than the stones and be laid in some quiet churchyard by the wayside, but his soul will never utterly forsake the road he helped to make. In man’s nature, and in all his works, there is a strange blending of the temporal and the eternal, and in nothing is it more marked than in the roads he builds. The roadmaker is the pioneer among men and without him there would be neither artist nor orator. He goes before civilization as John the Baptist went before Christ, and he is as rough and elemental. Hard as his own stones, without him mankind would have remained savage and suspicious as beasts of prey; and art, science and literature would have had no beginning. His road may begin in war, but it ends in peace.