That the automobile is one of the greatest boons to mankind will probably be admitted if all its benefits are fully understood.
The best teacher, it has been demonstrated, is one’s own experience. In learning anything, the mind can never grasp the lesson it is told, with the same understanding it receives when the lesson is visualized by the eye.
Travel is acknowledged to be a good educator and to broaden the mind. This is because the eye sees and takes its own impressions, and does not depend on the impressions of others. Reading books of travel never instruct as does travelling itself.
The automobile is a healthful, exhilarating method of conveying people to persons, places and scenes that, before the automobile, they knew of only by hearsay, or by reading of them.
To estimate the extent to which this informs and instructs, we need only go back in memory to the isolated farm of a quarter of a century ago, and vision the limited horizon of the general knowledge at first hand of the farmer’s family. Practically all the current knowledge they had was from reading, occasionally going to town or through visitors whose appearance was rare and made at long intervals. Seeing a new face in those days was a rarity.
The situation with a majority of the people in the country, before the automobile, was very much like the isolated farm family. It was like that of the entire country before the advent of the railroad.
No greater agencies for instruction in first hand knowledge than the railroad, the steamboat and the telephone had been introduced into civilization up to the time of the automobile. Now the motor car penetrates into places where the railroad, the steamboat, or even the telephone does not go.
Medium of Distribution of Knowledge.
Exchange of ideas between people is the life of wider knowledge, as the exchange of commodities is the life of world trade, and the automobile is the medium of exchanging information as money is a medium of exchange of commodities.
From time immemorial the greatest advancement of the human race has been made in groups; and the larger the groups, the higher the thought, and the more progressive the accomplishments have been. Big cities have surpassed small towns; small towns have been in advance of the country.