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 toindulge 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 oftime, 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.