QlOmieb Pieties ^ertetfe,
WASHINGTON, D. C.
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The following Declaration ’07 the Senators, Congressmen and others in 'Washington of the States of the southern national highway from Florida to California and Ilexico, and known as the Old Spanish Trail, was adopted June 1922.
1.	This highway is one of the basic trunklines of the United States system and anything that can he done to hasten its completion will he a service of national importance. It has been adopted by the states as a primary highway in the federal system for all its mileage except possibly a hundred miles still subject to decision. Tens of millions in federal, state and local moneys are available and construction according to federal standards is progressing rapidly, and this despite many areas of unusual difficulty. Justice to the important construction in progress, or financed and soon to be started, calls for immediate effort in sections still inactive that the service of an opened national trunkline may not bo denied because of barrier sections still unimproved.
2.	The Old Spanish Trail is a national and international tourist-way of some 4,000 miles. It connects the winter playground sections popular with the American people from 3t. Augustine through Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Pensacola, -.‘chile, the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Hew Orleans, Hew Iberia, Lake Charles, Houston, Galveston,
San Antonio, HI Fuse, Tucson, Phoenix and Yuma to Gan Diego and Los Angeles, and through Texas it embraces the land of Old Uexico. Because of its winter sunshine, its Gulf pleasures in summer, and its background of ancient and romantic history, its development will make it the natural resort of the Forth American people. When the nanerour hi,,in.ays from the Forth, now building, are completed this southern trunkline must absorb and care for the mass of travel that will seek these southern borderlands.
3.	It is the one national highway in the United States of direct military value, for it embraces all the extensive military, naval and air defenses and depots of the Gulf Coast and of the "exican Border, and it connects these with the defenses of the South Atlantic and the South Pacific seaboards. There is a larger concentration of national defenses and supplies on this highway than any other in the land.
4.	Therefore, in the public interest and for the sake of the all-tho-year service this highway will render to the travelers of the nation, and for its value to the military arms of the Government, general cooperation and effort are urged to complete it and open it from sea to sea in type and character equal to the service it will be called upon to render.