The Holy Earth

by L. H. Bailey

To bring them into use, and, at the same time, to protect them from rapacious citizens who have small social conscience, it is necessary to have good access. It is necessary to have roads. These roads should be laid where the resources exist, direct, purposeful. In a flat and uniform country, road systems may well be rectangular, following section-lines and intermediate lines; but the rectangularity is not the essential merit,—it is only a serviceable way of subdividing the resources. To find one's direction, north or south, is convenient, but it may clearly be subordinated to the utilization and protection of the supplies. The section-line division may accomplish this or it may not, and it is likely to place roads in wrong locations and to render the country monotonous and uninteresting.

But in the broken country, in the country of tumbled hills and crooked falling streams, of slopes that would better be left in the wild, and of lands that are good and fruitful for the plow, the roads may go the easy grades; but they ought also to go in such a plan as to open up the country to the best development, to divide its resources in the surest way for the greatest number of persons, and to reduce profitless human toil to the minimum,—and this is just what they may not do. They may go up over bare and barren hills merely to pass a few homesteads where no homesteads ought to be, roads that are always expensive and never good, that accomplish practically nothing for society. They leave good little valleys at one side, or enter them over almost impossible slopes. There are resources of physical wealth and of wonderful scenery that they do not touch, that would be of much value if they were accessible. The farming country is often not divided in such a way as to render it either most readily accessible or to make it the most useful as an asset for the people.

To connect villages and cities by stone roads is good. But what are we to do with all the back country, to make it contribute its needful part to feed the people in the days that are to come, and to open it to the persons who ought to go? We cannot accomplish this to the greatest purpose by the present road systems, even if the roads themselves are all made good.

When the traveler goes to a strange country, he is interested in the public buildings, the cities, and some of the visible externals; but if he wants to understand the country, he must have a detailed map of its roads. The automobile maps are of no value for this purpose, for they show how one may pass over the country, not how the country is developed. As the last nerve-fibre and the last capillary are essential to the end of the finger and to the entire body, so the ultimate roads are essential to the myriad farms and to the national life. It is difficult in any country to get these maps, accurately and in detail; but they are the essential guidebooks.

We undertake great conquests of engineering, over mountains and across rivers and through the morasses; but at the last we shall call on the engineer for the greatest conquest of all,—how to divide the surface of the earth so that it shall yield us its best and mean to us the most, on the easiest grades, in the most practicable way, that we may utilize every piece of land to fullest advantage.

This means a new division and perhaps a redistribution of lands in such a way that the farmer will have his due proportion of hill and of valley, rather than that one shall have all valley and another all hard-scrabble on the hill or all waste land in some remote place. It means that there will be on each holding the proper relation of tilled land and pasture land and forest land, and that the outlets for the farmer and his products will be the readiest and the simplest that it is possible to make. It means that some roads will be abandoned entirely, as not worth the cost, and society will make a way for farmers living on impossible farms to move to other lands; and that there will be no "back roads," for they will be the marks of an undeveloped society. It means that we shall cease the pretense to bring all lands into farming, whether they are useful for farming or not; and that in the back country beyond the last farms there shall be trails that lead far away.

In the farm region itself, much of the old division will pass away, being uneconomical and non-social. The abandonment of farms is in some cases a beginning of the process, but it is blind and undirected. Our educational effort is at present directed toward making the farmer prosperous on his existing farm, rather than to help him to secure a farm of proper resources and with proper access. As time goes on, we must reassemble many of the land divisions, if each man is to have adequate opportunity to make the most effective application of his knowledge, the best use of himself, and the greatest possible contribution to society. It would be well if some of the farms could be dispossessed of their owners, so that areas might be recombined on a better basis.

This is no Utopian or socialistic scheme, nor does it imply a forcible interference with vested rights. It is a plain statement of the necessities of the situation. Of course it cannot come about quickly or as a result of direct legislation; but there are various movements that may start it,—it is, in fact, already started. All the burning rural problems relate themselves in the end to the division of the land. In America, we do not suffer from the holding of the land in a few families or in an aristocratic class; that great danger we have escaped, but we have not yet learned how to give the land meaning to the greatest number of people. This is a question for the best political program, for we look for the day when statesmanship shall be expressed in the details of common politics.

We now hear much about the good-roads question, as if it were a problem only of highway construction: it is really a question of a new map.