Published in the interest of THE OLD SPANISH TRAIL
3
not solely	through	the great daily newspapers	where
space is valuable, and which arc perused largely by the business and professional men who need no propagandizing, but through the country weeklies also, and the result was	that almost overnight	the people	of	Texas
woke up and began to vote school bonds and build better schools and schoolhouscs. If you would sell an idea to the people of Texas you must reach them through the country newspapers. The ordinary educated business man, accustomed to his morning and afternoon daily, docs not realize how many of the real people of Texas rely solely on the country newspaper for information and how every line of this humble publication is read and digested.
The time	was, not	many decades	back, when	the	public
school was	not our	most popular	institution.	This was
largely the result of ignorance and man’s innate Chinese trait of opposition to a change of any kind—even to a change of linen, much less a change of mind.
Today the work, aims and accomplishments of the Highway Department of Texas arc unknown outside of a circle of engineers and county judges and good roads advocates and enthusiasts, and a few members of the Legislature who have taken time to get acquainted with the department and its work. The amount of absolute ignorance, as well as misinformation, prevalent about the Highway Department is appalling. So let each of ur« constitute himself, each for his own county and community, a committee to use the local press and his own ability to familiarize the people of Texas with this Highway Department of theirs and its importance to them, not only socially but financially. Once the people of Texas learn that this department is their agency to work out and construct systematically and efficiently for them, and their neighboring states as well, a connected system of public highways and to maintain them when constructed, there will no longer be an ever present fear in our minds that some uninformed and uninform-able member of the Texas Legislature will abolish the department over night. When this fellow learns that the real honcst-to-goodness people of Texas are behind this department with their means and their brains, he is at least rendered speechless—if not dumb. Such, unfortunately, is the political status of the average politician in Texas that no matter how right and progressive a thing may be, he must first be convinced it is popular. It sometimes looks as if representative government, as understood by tne fathers of this Republic, is no longer existent; and that it would be better to designate our delegates reflectors. So one of the highway problems of Texas is to familiarize the ordinary voter with the work, reason for and aims of, the Highway Department and let him know that it is not a mere Federal governmental agency that is attempting to encroach on and absorb all of his God-given rights—even his right to work or not to work his neighborhood road. The people of Texas will do the right thing always, but they must know. They are Missourians in the slang sense—“show me.”
The problem of getting the money to carry out a laid-out and worked-out program of highway improvement in as large a State as Texas has been and will continue to be a big problem. But as a people we have gotten individually and collectively what we wanted and needed whether it cost a million or a billion, so when we decide as a people that these roads arc worth the money—that we ivant- them and need them—then Texas resources and Texas brain will furnish the money.
Under the new Federal Aid Act one of the problems of the department that it has been called upon to settle is: Which 7 per cent.—approximately 11,000 miles of highway—out of a total mileage of approximately 160,000 miles of road is really, all things considered, the most important 11,000 miles. With every citizen of every town and city in Texas knowing to a certainty that his road is absolutely the most important one out of the 160,000 miles it is the job of the Highway Department to disillusion them as to about 149,000 miles of these roads. It is a job that cannot be settled like the proverbial difficulty of the “Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe” was
settled. I have always wondered what were this old dame’s difficulties the next morning—the morning after, so to speak.
The Highway Department is supreme in its jurisdiction and settles many very grave and close questions. To do this reasonably, correctly and justly, not only requires judgment but an extensive knowledge of Texas geography, trade, travel, local conditions, etc. The Texas Highway Commission should have an intimate knowledge of Texas in order to fix rightly, and for the future as well as the present, the locations, connections and routes of her interstate and intrastate highways—many of them fully a°. important as any trunk line of railway ever built in Texas—yet we have a commission of purely a political tenure of office, changeable upon the whim or predilection of each incoming Governor. This should not be. The Highway Commission of Texas should rest upon a more stable businesslike foundation. A tenure of, say, two, four and six years should be adopted so that a fixed program or policy could be laid out and pursued. This is a legislature problem, yet a very important highway problem as well.
As now organized and empowered under the law and Constitution the department can not function to best advantage, as it must function through the commissioners courts and depend' upon the counties to maintain the highways after they arc built. Can you imagine the railway systems of Texas built and maintained on such a basis.? The new Federal Aid Act gives us three years in which to remedy these defects of organization and operation. To do this is to my mind one of the big problems before the Legislature at its next session and the public must be educated on this matter. When the construction and maintenance of our State and Federal system of connected highways is placed directly under the jurisdiction of the Highway Department, then will we have taken a long step forward; and we are going to take that step.
' There has been some agitation to the effect that the cities should have their own automobile taxes and receive aid on their roads and streets. State and Federal aid docs not contemplate any such plan and this idea should, be combatted. “A Connected System” is our text whether it be for the construction of a bridge across the Trinity River in Polk County, where crossings on bridges arc 100 miles apart, or one across Devils River, where bridges have heretofore been unknown. It is for counties and projects which arc poor and weak financially that aid was especially designed. Without these poor, whom you always have with you, there would be no rich and populous cities with their thousands of automobiles, and I trust the law will remain as it is.
One of our problems has been. “How much aid shall any county be granted?” We settled that over conshlci-ablc opposition by making the limit to each county in Texas, however large or small, weak or strong, financially., politically or otherwise, exactly the same. Dallas County with all her would-be United States senators, and governors, banks and business, gets no more than Polk, and Bexar, with all her prestige and pride of ancestry, no more than Shelby.
Another of our problems has been and will be the type of road for the different sections of Texas. We have the Fast Texas country, the black land belt, the coastal plains counry, the plains of the Panhandle, and, the mountains of West Texas, and each has its own peculiar problems. These must all be solved »o meet conditions in each particular section. Verily, I ^av to you. the highway problems of Texas arc many and big and are growing more numerous and bigger. Now that Windrow has gone to Missouri to “show them,” personally, I am pinning my faith on my faithful colleague. Bob Hubbard, who has made sacrifices in a personal way for the Highway Department of Texas, and upon our new engineer, Captain Fauntlcroy, who made my speech on this occasion bv reason of being first on the program.
Differing from some of the previous speakers on tHs program I do not think education in the scholastic sense has had much to do with our good road mou«nien‘, further than furnishing the technical engineering t-dent. Harkening back to our primeval instinct, everv human being, male or female, from childhood has dreamed of being a bird with wings. Growing up near to nature as