Quotation for the day: R. W. Richardson

The secretary of the National Good Roads' Association condescended to the farmers and other "densely indifferent" opponents of State coercion:

The plan of national and state aid is the solution of the road problem; it equalizes the burden of cost and provides the means in an equitable and just method, together with intelligent supervision which insures proper application of the funds and good permanent roadways as results.

Every sound and practical argument favors this principle, and every advocate for a system of improved roads in the United States, may confidently go to the people clad in the panoply of a just cause and a patriotism devoted to the most useful, necessary and practical of all internal improvements and the most directly and substantially beneficial to all people and to all interests whether social, industrial, commercial or agricultural.

I doubt if any other question, in the short time, it has been before the people, has received such universally favorable sentiment, but there still remains a great deal of dense indifference upon the subject.  It is strange, too, that the agricultural classes so immediately and directly concerned, should be so slow in appreciating the justice of and demand the application of this principle in the solution of the difficult problem of the permanent improvement of the common roads of the country.

R. W. Richardson, "Must Unite for Education," Good Roads Magazine, vol. 5 (May 1904) 221; digitized copy here (courtesy of Google Books).