The Report of the Road Fund, which was lately issued
by the Ministry of Transport, affords some interest- ing reading and shows how great is the opportunity before us of making a really good thing out of our distracted and higgledy-piggledy roads instead of a wasteful mixture of muddle and half measures. One of the most encouraging facts in the Report is an account of the unexpectedly high quality of road-work done by the unemployed. That is exactly what we hoped would happen if the problem was approached in the proper way—i.e., as a public benefit and not as a semi-disciplinary measure for keeping down the un- employed lists. No doubt a sham unemployed or work- shy man will do no more work on a road than he will on anything else, but the genuine unemployed, such as we have now, alas 1 by the hundred thousand, will work if they are properly organized and made to feel that they are worth something and not mere encumbrances. The notion that an unemployed man has not the requisite skill or physique for road-work is rubbish. If it were true, how could the men in France have dug themselves in or made miles of roads and railways behind the lines ? Yet this work was seldom aided by any of the enormous and expensive plant without which people now tell us it is impossible to make a road. The roadmaking in the fighting zones, like the trench-work, was largely the product of individual pickaxes and spades.
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