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CHAPTER II
THE UTILITY OF MOTOR VEHICLES
By the Hon. John Scott-Montagu, M.P.
It is now admitted by most people that the motor-car has passed the limits of mere experiment, and that it has become a practical vehicle. Motoring has already entered, and will in the future enter yet more largely, into our social life, though we may still be far from the time when the horse-drawn vehicle will be a rarity upon country roads and London has begun to save fifty thousand pounds a year now spent in road scavengering.
The utility of the motor is endless. At whatever distance you may live from your station in the country, the motor is bound to shorten the time occupied on the journey to and fro, and houses six miles from a railway become as accessible as houses three miles distant are to-day with horses. Whether you consider the motor from the town or country station point of view, the fact that there are no horses to get tired, and that the motor will run, providing it is efficiently handled, for any hour or all hours during the twenty-four, makes it inevitable that every country house of any dimensions, and nearly every private carriage-owner in London, will have a motor-car of some sort or kind in coming years. The difficulty at first is always the same in any new movement of this kind: the would-be buyer and future owner most probably knows nothing about the machine of which he is to be the possessor, and to get a trustworthy and capable driver and mechanician is even harder than the selection of the motor in the first instance.
I am inclined to think that for town work electricity and steam will be the main propulsive agents. The delightful
