The census of 1880 recorded a population of 50,000,000.  In two decades more we may reasonably expect to count thrice that number.  In the three decades ending in 1920 the country’s freight by rail increased from 631,000,000 tons to 2,234,000,000 tons; that is to say, while our population was increasing, less than 70 per cent, the freight movement increased over 250 per cent.

We have built 40 per cent of the world’s railroad mileage, and yet find it inadequate to our present requirements.  When we contemplate the inadequacy of to-day it is easy to believe that the next few decades will witness the paralysis of our transportation-using social scheme or a complete reorganization on some new basis.  Mindful of the tremendous costs of betterments, extensions, and expansions, and mindful of the staggering debts of the world to-day, the difficulty is magnified.  Here is a problem demanding wide vision and the avoidance of mere makeshifts.  No matter what the errors of the past, no matter how we acclaimed construction and then condemned operations in the past, we have the transportation and the honest investment in the transportation which sped us on to what we are, and we face conditions which reflect its inadequacy to-day, its greater inadequacy to-morrow, and we contemplate transportation costs which much of the traffic can not and will not continue to pay.

Manifestly, we have need to begin on plans to coordinate all transportation facilities.  We should more effectively connect up our rail lines with our carriers by sea.  We ought to reap some benefit from the hundreds of millions expended on inland waterways, proving our capacity to utilize as well as expend.  We ought to turn the motor truck into a railway feeder and distributor instead of a destroying competitor.

It would be folly to ignore that we live in a motor age.  The motor car reflects our standard of living and gauges the speed of our present-day life.  It long ago ran down Simple Living, and never halted to inquire about the prostrate figure which fell as its victim.  With full recognition of motor-car transportation we must turn it to the most practical use.  It can not supersede the railway lines, no matter how generously we afford it highways out of the Public Treasury.  If freight traffic by motor were charged with its proper and proportionate share of highway construction, we should find much of it wasteful and more costly than like service by rail.  Yet we have paralleled the railways, a most natural line of construction, and thereby taken away from the agency of expected service much of its profitable traffic, which the taxpayers have been providing the highways, whose cost of maintenance is not yet realized.

The Federal Government has a right to inquire into the wisdom of this policy, because the National Treasury is contributing largely to this highway construction.  Costly highways ought to be made to serve as feeders rather than competitors of the railroads, and the motor truck should become a coordinate factor in our great distributing system.