The ability and efficiency of the commercial truck for hard city work are undisputed.  It has had its test in New York, where traffic is dense and most difficult to handle.  Here, of course, are the ideal conditions for the successful use of the motor-truck—­which are a full load, a long haul, and a good road.  In a city, a horse vehicle can make only about five miles an hour, while a motor-truck makes twelve miles, and carries three times the load.

Some idea of motor-truck possibilities in New York may be gained when it is stated that there are nearly three hundred thousand licensed carrying vehicles there.

The amount of work to be got out of a motor-truck is astonishing.  John Wanamaker, for instance, gets a hundred miles of travel per day out of some of his delivery-wagons.  The average five-ton truck, in a ten-hour day, can make eighty miles, and keep constantly at work.  On the other hand, a one-horse wagon can scarcely average half that mileage.

Already your doctor whirls around in an automobile, and he can make five times more visits than with a horse.  So, too, with the contractor and the builder.  The drummer carries his samples in a gasoline runabout, and, in addition to seeing twice the number of customers, he can get their goodwill by taking them for a spin.  Fire-engines, hose-wagons, and police patrols race to conflagrations propelled by motors, and get there quicker than ever before.

Just as practically every great American activity ultimately harks back to the soil and has its real root there, so, in a certain sense, may the farmer be regarded as the backbone of the automobile business.  We have six million farms, and more than forty-five millions of our population live on the farm, or in communities of less than four thousand people.  To these dwellers in the country the automobile has already proved an agency for uplift, progress, and prosperity.

It began as a pleasure-car; now it is a necessity on many farms.  In Kansas you can see it hitched up to the alfalfa-stacker; in Illinois and Iowa it is harnessed up to the corn-cutter; in Indiana it runs the dairy machinery.  But these are slight compared with the other services it performs for the farmer.

For years the curse of farm life was its isolation.  Its workers were removed from the shops, the theaters, the libraries, and good schools.  More farm women went insane than any other class.  The horses worked in the fields all week, and had to rest on Sunday, so that the farmer could not go to church.

The automobile provided a vehicle not excessive in cost, and able to provide pleasure for the farmer’s whole family.  It annihilated the distance between town and country.  Contact with his coworkers and proximity to the market made the fanner more efficient and prosperous.  More than this, the motor-car has made the whole rural life more attractive, and offers the one inducement that will keep the boy on the farm.