Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen | Page 4

around New Haven for many miles in three directions the motor trucks come down in the evening to the boat. The boat leaves a little before midnight and arrives in New York in the morning, when the freight is transferred and goes out on the early trains for the West. It is a good system of interlocking service such as we have got to have.
My conception of the future of the New York Barge Canal and the canal across New Jersey and the Chesapeake and Ohio and all the waterways is that the companies operating on them shall pick up and deliver at every important terminal point by lines which shall radiate out by motor trucks from 50 to 100 miles, and they shall take from these places goods thus brought to their station. So that if when, for example, they were delivering goods from Kentucky to Illinois, it might start from a farm or from an inland village by motor truck and go to the nearest waterway station, there to be picked up by a vessel and to be carried down the Kentucky and Ohio to a point sufficiently near in Illinois to where it was to go, there to be picked up by motor trucks which would carry it to its destination, and it should be billed through by one bill of lading. That would definitely establish that the vehicles and highways are not accidental or incidental but an essential factor. That, it seems to me, is what we are coming to before very long. I imagine we will come to it almost before we think of it.
From that are a number of inferences. The public authorities have got to be sufficiently educated to make a good thing possible. They have got to learn, as many a farmer has to learn, that the most costly thing in the world is a bad road; that as compared with seal-skin furs and platinum mud is far more costly an item; and that there is no such evidence of a muddy state of mind in a community as a muddy state of highways in the community. They go together--mental and physical mud.
Now, let us see whether our idea is false or true in its application. The Hudson River has by it six tracks of railroad. The fleet of vessels upon the Hudson River was never as great, never so new or well equipped as to-day. The vessel with the largest passenger capacity, or at least second largest (6,000 persons), is in operation on that river. The freight carried on the river amounts to over 8,000,000 tons a year by water. I put a factory at Troy because I could get by water express service at freight rates, loading machines on the boat in the evening and have them delivered in New York the next morning, while to ship the same material by railroad to New York would require three to five days by freight.
Directly back from the river bank on either side are two of our fine highways. Neither the railroad nor the river meet all the needs of the men living on those roads. You might build the railroads up until they are 10 tracks wide, but you do not fully help the farmer 10 miles away to get his produce to market. And you might fill the river with steamers, and he may be still isolated. There must come something to his farm which transports his produce easily and systematically and in harmony with other methods in duplex action going and coming. So our friend the farmer must have the rural express or its equivalent, which comes to his door, which in the morning connects him up with all the round earth and brings him what he wants of the earth's products back to his door that night.
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