Address by Honorable Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior at Conference of Regional Chairmen | Page 2

evening paper as during the past month. There never has been a time when we have been so thrilled to the very core of our beings. Achievements that those boys over there have made are things that will live in our memories.
And why has it been possible for France to carry on for four years a successful war against the greatest military power that the world has ever seen? Because France had the benefit of the engineering skill and of the foresight of two men who are 1,800 years apart--Napoleon and Caesar. Those men built the roads of France. Without those roads, conceived and built originally by Caesar for the conquest of the Gauls and for the conquest of the Teutons, without the roads built by Napoleon to stand off the enemies of France and to make aggressions to the eastward, Paris would have fallen at least two years ago. So that you gentlemen who are engaged in the business of developing the highways of the country and putting them to greater use may properly conceive of yourselves as engaged in a very farsighted, important bit of statemanship, work that does not have its only concern as to the farmer of this country or the helping of freight movement during this winter alone, but may have consequences that will extend throughout the centuries. Take the instance of Verdun. Verdun would have fallen unquestionably if it had not been for the roads that Napoleon constructed and that France has maintained; for all the credit is not to go to the man who conceived and the man who constructed. This is one thing where we have been short always. One thing that the people of the United States do not realize. It is not sufficient to pay $25,000 a mile for a concrete foundation, but you must put aside 10 cents out of every dollar for the maintenance of these roads or your money has gone to waste and your conception is idle. And you gentlemen know, if you continue, as I hope you will, after the war, you will have not merely a function in the securing of the building of good roads, but will have a very great function in the maintaining of these roads as actual arteries in the system of transportation of the country. You remember that at Verdun the railroad was cut off, and Verdun was supported by the fact that she had trucks which could go 40 feet apart all night long over the great highway that had been built from Paris to the east.
Now I saw my first national service in connection with the Interstate Commerce Commission and I was much impressed by the theory that the railroad men had, which was a very natural theory, arising out of their own experience and out of the fact that there was a new force in the world with which they were playing. Their conception was that the highway was a mere means of getting from the farm to the railroad; that the waterway was a mere means of carrying off the surplus waters from the hills to the oceans. The statement has often been made to me that there would never be an occasion when it would be necessary or possible to put into competition with the railroads the waterways of this country; that it would cost more to use those waterways or to use highways than it would to do the same transportation work by railroad. And they had obtained figures to show that under conditions of unlimited competition the Illinois Central, for instance, paralleling the Mississippi River, could do business at a cheaper rate than it could be transported by water, considering the cost of bringing it to the water station and unloading it at the other end. Now, as Mr. Chapin has said, a larger conception has come into the American mind--the conception of the utilization of all our resources. While the railroad has a great burden cast upon it; while it is the strong right arm in this work, still we must remember that the strong right arm must have fingers, and that there should be in a complete physical system a good left arm.
The highways that you are interested in are more than interesting to me for another reason.
I have thought of the men who will come back after the war. Every nation has had a problem to deal with the returning soldier. If you read Ferraro's history of Rome, you will find that one of the chief reasons why the republic of Rome went out of existence and the empire of Rome came into existence was because of the returned soldiers. They looked to their general to take care of them on their return, and their general found that the