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

water. I
suppose that there has never been a month in the history of the United
States when so many people were so anxious to see the morning paper
or the 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