I can not think of that except as a matter of common sense. It is a thing which has got to be, and in a very few years, at least, will be as accepted as such things as the rising of the sun and the setting of the sun. It will be considered normal. You will even find, if you have not already found, farms offered for sale on the basis of having a rural express coming and going on one side of it—perhaps on two sides of it as we get into it more thoroughly. The whole rural postal-delivery system was the promise and pledge of the rural express. What we do when we send the motor truck through the rural centers is to push the rural free-delivery and the parcel-post service just one step forward. I have had motor trucks put on the Pribilof Islands, in the Behring Sea. They are building the roads to run on before they can run on them. And there, 250 miles north of the Aleutian Islands, we can make motor trucks pay for themselves in a single year by the force they add in effective transportation. We have a seal rookery 13 or 14 miles from the village of St. Paul Island. We have not been able to kill seals there, because we could not get skins down to the village. Now a couple of motor trucks bring them down without the least difficulty, and in order to get the road there they carried down materials to build the road. So in the same way we have a great many fishery stations isolated. You can not put fish hatcheries in towns. We get them as far off as practicable. The problem is to get sufficient water and isolation, and so those stations are rather difficult to reach. In those places to-day we have put motor trucks. Here with these important stations 6, 8, 9, and 10 miles and sometimes more away, it was perfectly obvious that the best, simplest, and quickest means of access was necessary and for several years now we have been putting little Ford trucks in there, if you can call them trucks, and I presume some of you anyway still do. They have changed the effectiveness of the whole thing.
That is all very simple. I imagine that one great difficulty in this world is that the simple things are sometimes very hard to bring about. It is true in a certain sense that if we bring to a man something that is difficult and complex it catches the mind by its very complexity and strangeness. But if we come to him and say that mud is one of his worst enemies it seems hard to him that it could be as bad as it really is, as he is sort of friendly toward the mud. So many are familiar with the automobile—not as familiar, I believe, as they are going to be—that it seems hard to think it can work as revolutionary a change in their life as it is going to do. But I am perfectly certain that there abide these three elements of transportation—railway, water way, and highway—that they are one, and that none of them will reach its full value to the community without the other, and that each is the friend of the other.