The country roads do not share in the advance. Nominally the South has over 600,000 miles of public highway, but little of it has even been improved. Some of the old pikes have gone to ruin, others are still kept up by tolls; but in many regions which have been well settled and thriving for a century and a half there is a dearth of bridges, and in bad weather the roads are almost impassable. So far, the difficulty is not much relieved by trolley lines. The cities are well supplied and some of them have a superior system; but few parts of the South have such a string of populous places as will justify interurban lines, exceptions being the Richmond-Norfolk and Dallas-Fort Worth systems. The trolley lines have been much developed by a Northern syndicate which, under the name of Stone & Webster, has made a business of buying or building and operating electric plants, many of them with elaborate water power; and the current is distributed for power, light, and transportation. Stone & Webster's lines can be found all over the Union, as in Minneapolis and in the state of Washington, as well as in the South. The capital of the trolley roads in 1906 was 3,765 millions, or a fifth of the total trolley investment in the United States. At the best points of contact between rail and water transportation great port enterprises are springing up. Galveston is the only port along the whole coast of Texas with easily obtainable deep water, and the Government has spent great sums in improving it, while the city has made the most gallant effort to rebuild and fortify itself against the invasion of the sea which a few years ago almost destroyed it. New Orleans feels itself the natural port of the lower Mississippi valley, and the Eads system of jetties keeps the mouth of the river open, though there is not water enough to float the great steamers that come into the large Atlantic ports, and the wharf charges are heavy; the actual commerce of New Orleans--exports and imports together--was in 1907 $28,000,000 less than that of Galveston. Inasmuch as New Orleans is a hundred miles from the open sea, an effort has been made to provide capital to build a gulf port about fifty miles to the eastward, but so far little progress has been made. The city of New Orleans has shown unusual enterprise in building a public belt line railroad ten miles long, intended to connect with all the roads entering the city; and the city thus steps alongside Cincinnati as the owner of a veritable municipal steam railroad. Between these ports there is unceasing rivalry, and the depth of water on the bar outside Galveston, or at the mouth of the Mississippi, is as interesting to the Southern business man as the bulletin of a football game is to a Northerner. Texas will prove to you by science, logic, and prophecy that no deep-draught vessel can get into New Orleans, or pay the awful port charges after it arrives; the Louisianian is confident that the next