Chapter V: Benefits Conferred by the Automobile

That the automobile is one of the greatest boons to mankind will probably be admitted if all its benefits are fully understood.

The best teacher, it has been demonstrated, is one’s own experience. In learning anything, the mind can never grasp the lesson it is told, with the same understanding it receives when the lesson is visualized by the eye.

Travel is acknowledged to be a good educator and to broaden the mind. This is because the eye sees and takes its own impressions, and does not depend on the impressions of others. Reading books of travel never instruct as does travelling itself.

The automobile is a healthful, exhilarating method of conveying people to persons, places and scenes that, before the automobile, they knew of only by hearsay, or by reading of them.

To estimate the extent to which this informs and instructs, we need only go back in memory to the isolated farm of a quarter of a century ago, and vision the limited horizon of the general knowledge at first hand of the farmer’s family. Practically all the current knowledge they had was from reading, occasionally going to town or through visitors whose appearance was rare and made at long intervals. Seeing a new face in those days was a rarity.

The situation with a majority of the people in the country, before the automobile, was very much like the isolated farm family. It was like that of the entire country before the advent of the railroad.

No greater agencies for instruction in first hand knowledge than the railroad, the steamboat and the telephone had been introduced into civilization up to the time of the automobile. Now the motor car penetrates into places where the railroad, the steamboat, or even the telephone does not go.

MEDIUM OF DISTRIBUTION OF KNOWLEDGE.

Exchange of ideas between people is the life of wider knowledge, as the exchange of commodities is the life of world trade, and the automobile is the medium of exchanging information as money is a medium of exchange of commodities.

From time immemorial the greatest advancement of the human race has been made in groups; and the larger the groups, the higher the thought, and the more progressive the accomplishments have been. Big cities have surpassed small towns; small towns have been in advance of the country.

The reason for this is the greater opportunity afforded by numbers for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. The citizen of Rome or of Venice had the advantage of personal contact with numbers of citizens which the isolated rural Latin was denied, as the citizen of London, Paris, New York or Chicago has, before his own eyes, the thought and achievements of millions which the citizens of the country only hear of or read about.

The railroad first enabled the resident of the country to go to the small town, and the resident of the small town to go to the big city, and by personal contact gather the fruits of himself seeing the results of community or group work, which, before, had been monopolized by his city brother.

The automobile supplements this work of the railroad, and is even more widespread as it enables more frequent visits to be made, and penetrates regions the railroad does not reach. What was a frontier is now a suburb, while the suburb has become the downtown. The motor car has opened up the far reaches as nothing else has done.

Bigotry and prejudice are the fruits of ignorance. Where knowledge is they will not abide. In enabling people to acquire knowledge in their own way—the way that most impresses knowledge on them—the automobile is changing the thought and the habits of the denizens of the entire country. It is broadening the human mind, by giving it a solid foundation to work on.

In the courts of law, among judges, lawyers and court attendants, it is notorious that no two witnesses ever testify exactly to the same set of facts. There is a variation of detail, and many times there has been such a difference in the statement of material facts that the dispensing of exact justice has been defeated.

This condition is ascribed to the fact that few people are trained observers. The automobile is correcting this popular defect more than any other one agency—by education. It is educating people to exact observation and precise knowledge.

LIBERALIZING THE PEOPLE.

The automobile is a factor in creating open minds. When one travels extensively, notions and prejudices, based on false conceptions, are amended and revised by observance of the facts. In this respect the automobile is conferring on the masses a benefit which, before its advent, was confined to the classes. Time was when broad and liberal views were generally the possession of the rich, who alone could afford to indulge in contact with their fellows many miles distant. Now the automobile has aided in making broader views the possession of anybody able to own a motor car.

The degree in which the social life of the world has been benefited by the automobile is the favorite theme of the enthusiast on the automobile’s advantage to mankind. This phase of the automobile’s value is of less importance than is its benefit in informing and enlarging the horizon of the mind, but the social advantages which the use of the motor car confers are not to be underrated in an age when the most favorable mental conditions are recognized as of equal importance to a desirable physical state.

The happiness of the human race is added to by social enjoyment, and the automobile is a most important link between isolation and human intercourse. It has rendered the means of communication between people so easy and pleasant that it has encouraged and increased their association. Everybody is brought into greater accessibility to everybody else. The farmer with his family can visit his neighbor farmer and his family, many times now to once formerly.

What was formerly a long, arduous journey taken at the expense of pleasure as well as of time, is now an exhilarating spin. The farmer’s wife and daughters can now go to town more frequently, and multiply the number of their visits to friends. The automobile is the emancipator of the farm woman, bringing the scope of her activities out of the narrow circle of routine drudgery and monotony into the larger circle of inspiring activities.

Farm women’s clubs have been given an impetus, through the fact that a woman may attend one in the afternoon with the assurance that by the use of the automobile she can return home in sufficient time to get dinner, which she could not do by the use of the horse.

FACTOR IN PROMOTING SOCIABILITY.

The city man’s wife in the suburbs can visit her friends oftener and more quickly, and the facility of speedy movement has given to suburbanites the benefit of the last acts at the theatre and the opera, whereas, before the automobile, they missed them in order to catch the last train.

The benefit of clergy has been immeasurably enhanced by the automobile, which, also, in addition to being itself an educational agent, has employed its speed and facilities in economizing time to increase the attendance in the schools. There are districts in the United States where children can not reach school in time without the use of the automobile.

What the automobile does for the city dweller, in enabling him to see the last act at the theatre or hear the last act of the opera, it does for the people of the farm in enabling them to spare the time to attend dances, sociables, entertainments and motion picture shows. Where formerly the time required to drive a horse made it impossible to spare the time, now time is scarcely a factor. The change must inevitably react to the advantage and benefit of humanity, if all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

The health advantage of the automobile is a subject on which there is a difference of opinion among medics. The ordinary layman, however, is disposed to cast his verdict in its favor in this respect also. Some physicians have expressed the opinion that the only respect in which the automobile is noticeably not a benefit is in the matter of health. Some of them think it does not give people enough exercise, and that at the rate its use is increasing it will not be long before man loses his ability to use his legs!

It would be a catastrophe indeed if the human race, through the automobile, reverted to the condition when primitive man, according to the Darwinian theory, swung by his hairy arms from tree limb to tree limb, using his feet only as a stabilizer. But nobody, unless a writer for a newspaper Sunday magazine section, is likely to maintain this seriously, and he only pretends to be serious.

Whatever man loses in disuse of his legs by riding, as compared with walking, may be said to be made up for by his use of them on levers of automobiles and in the other exercise or operation of a car. The fresh air and the sunlight—the great outdoors—are the big health factors in motoring, and man will go on taking a chance to experience these and other delights the automobile has to give.

AS AN ELEMENT IN EUGENICS.

And as still further offsetting the possibilities of decay of the human legs, which certain physicians predict, more constructive medical men have discovered that automobiling is becoming a factor in one phase of eugenics. It may not receive endorsement as a benefit in all eugenics as long as the charge can be made that since the use of the motor car the birthrate in Kansas has decreased, the discoverer accounting for this alleged fact on the theory that the expense of keeping an automobile discourages Kansans from assuming the expense of large families, but in one direction it is attempted to prove that the breed of certain Americans is being improved by the automobile, and in this way:

In certain parts of the country, particularly the Southeastern states close intermarriage is said to have been, in part, due to the inferior facilities for transportation, before the automobile came into use. Young men, it is said, courted and married their sweethearts, in the days when the buggy was king of local communication, within an average radius of five to ten miles, which accounted for people in those sections being cousins or otherwise related to one another.

Now that the automobile makes a thirty-mile or fifty-mile radius the equivalent of the five-mile or ten-mile buggy radius, the swains are seeking mates further afield, thus getting away from alliances with relatives, and there is a consequent decrease in the mixing of blood strains.

If this is true, tally one more in the score of benefits for the automobile, for it is the verdict of science that intermarriage between those of the same blood does not produce the best types, any more than does the interbreeding of other animals.

But in enumerating the benefits of the automobile its economic value easily comes next in importance to its service in imparting knowledge. Its health value may be a matter of difference of opinion, and its social benefits are comparative, but there can be no dispute about its educational value, and still less about its economic worth.

The factor time has taken on a new meaning and significance with the automobile’s accomplishments in speed. Time is a vital element in the affairs of life. If the automobile’s educational value can be expressed by the adage, “Seeing is believing”, its economic value can be similarly expressed by the adage, “Time is money”.

PART PLAYED IN ECONOMICS.

Time is likewise life under some circumstances, and because of this fact, the professional men who were first to make practical use of the automobile were physicians, commandeering it in behalf of life itself. How many lives have been saved by the automobile, which would have been lost through the slow going gig or phaeton, it is not possible to say, because there is, of course, no exact record, but the number is large. The mortality of today among people is greatly reduced from that of twenty years ago. The advance of science has, of course, brought this about, but the automobile is an important instrument of medical science, just as are the X-ray, the stethoscope and the pulmotor.

And the same cause—the element of time—which operated in the adoption of the automobile by the physician to the human body, has forced the veterinarian to use the automobile. This is irony—for the horse—and another nail in the equine coffin, but it is at the same time another demonstration of the automobile’s superiority in efficiency over that animal.

The farmer demands that the veterinarian shall come in an auto to attend his sick horses or cattle, because he will not take the chance of death through delay. And this is scarcely gratitude—by the farmer to the horse—but it is economic pressure.

At every turn in the road of the automobile’s advance, we see its economic value. We see in cities that the big department store is able to cut down its delivery expense from $990 to $350 a day by using a fleet of motor trucks instead of horse drawn wagons; that coal, ice, groceries, feed—practically all commodities in cities—can be delivered by motor trucks at a large saving of cost. Contractors, plumbers, plasterers, tinners, and craftsmen in substantially all lines, have figured it out and concluded that with the facilities of the automobile available, the horse is a distinct economic waste in their businesses.

The possibilities of similar economy by the farmer in the substitution of motor power for horse power have been indicated by many progressive farmers who have by experiments demonstrated that the cost of hauling and cultivating with motor wagons and machinery is less than by using horses, but the general economic saving by the use of the motor vehicle in hauling cannot get its fullest and conclusive demonstration until better roads are more numerous. Where roads are nearly perfect, results have shown the cost of horse hauling to be 30 cents a ton, against 14 cents a ton by motor truck, by the mile, figuring everything.

INFLUENCE IN GETTING BETTER ROADS.

By far the direction in which the automobile has forced on conviction most strongly its economic potentialities, is in the matter of better roads. No greater tribute to the educational value of the automobile could have been paid than was paid to it by President Wilson when he signed the Federal Good Roads bill which puts $85,000,000 of national money against an equal amount by the states, into making better highways. It was the popular demand for better roads, following the general use of the automobile, that gave the country the improvements made in roads in the last fifteen years, and it was the demand from the same source for more of these improvements that resulted in the Federal Good Roads law.

Until the coming of the motor car the good roads issue possessed little vitality. For seventy-five years the Federal government exercised a passive policy toward building permanent highways. Railroads pushed into virgin territory, cities sprang up along the right of way, but the rural arteries of travel remained in the same hopeless condition as when the pioneers waded through them afoot or on horseback.

With the first motor car came the first feeble impulse to the good roads movement. The first cars were sold to city men, who very quickly found out that where city pavements ended, there ended all hopes of further travel. Pneumatic tires availed nothing against trackless stretches of gumbo mud or corduroy roads. With the mechanical improvements in motor cars, the owners chafed at their limitations and demanded better state roads.

As a result of the agitation, many states have become active in promoting their own road systems, and quite a little has been accomplished in some localities; but the sum total of improved roads in the United States today is only 250,000 miles out of a total of 2,275,000 miles of roads. The Federal roads bill will give an impetus to state work on roads, and as its appropriation covers the next five years, 1922 should see a large increase in the miles of improved roads in the country.

The results in benefit to the agriculture of the country in a general system of good roads, will be most felt through the facility it will give the farmer in marketing his products. With the aid of the motor truck, the farmer may be able to meet, in many cases, the congestion-of-freight-by-railroad problem.

Adding to its other benefits, the automobile promises to be an element in the reduction of the high cost of living, and if it does aid in this it will be in two directions, first, as a freight carrier, and, second, by displacing the horse.

FACILITATING THE PASSING OF THE HORSE.

A horse, it is estimated, consumes each year the production of five acres of land. There are 21,000,000 horses in the United States, and therefore the fertility of 100,000,000 acres is enlisted annually in behalf of this animal. If this area, which is as great as Ohio, Indiana and Illinois combined, were released from this burden, and the products were human food, a very large addition would be made to the food stuffs of which the world is in such sore need.

The elimination of the horse is progressing at a very rapid rate in cities, and the prediction is made that it will come to an end ultimately in the country, and that a horse in future will be only a pet or an element in sport. Thomas A. Edison has decreed the horse’s life for practical, general use, to be only ten years. Those who foresee his passing on the farm say that automobile engineers are working on small tractors which will be practicable in the cultivation of farms as small as 60 acres, and that they will ultimately be gotten down to a price which will not exceed the original cost and upkeep of a horse, and will do more and better work in the field.

The list of benefits conferred by the automobile is incomplete, if its use in war is omitted. It has been said that it saved France twice during its latest war. When the onrush of Germans in 1914 brought them almost within sight of Paris, General Gallieni, then Governor of Paris, rushed troops by the thousands in motor vehicles to the aid of General Foch. They turned the tide and made possible the victory of the Marne.

Motor trucks saved Verdun. The German advance had cut the French railway connections. Horse drawn wagons never could have brought the supplies. Motor trucks did. Had there been no such things as motor trucks, nothing, it is claimed, could have saved Verdun.

In war or peace, then, the automobile is a factor. As an agent in the advance of civilization it occupies a secure place. It has doubled the population of at least one city, and has given new life to others.

In forcing good roads it has enhanced the value of agricultural land. It is a well settled fact that the increase in selling price of farm lands through good main market roads is from one to three times the cost of the road improvements.

The likelihood is that with the increased use of the automobile, benefits from it will multiply. These benefits are, naturally, not as great with only three and a half million automobiles in use as we can well imagine they would be with the use of the motor car practically universal for passenger, hauling and farm cultivation purposes.

Much bigger things for the automobile than it has yet accomplished can be safely predicted.