Has the time come when more serious attention promising financial returns will be given to the commercial motor vehicle? It has. As far as the electric power wagon is concerned seven years at least have elapsed since its engineering development had reached a point where it affords the cheapest possible means of distributing merchandise on a large scale in paved cities. For maximum economy of service the electric power wagons and the gasoline power wagons have their respective fields of utility. The heavy gasoline power wagon is recognized by experts to require some further engineering development, although the European steam lorry for interurban service has been satisfactory for many years.

Why are power wagons not in more general use? The reasons are natural and simple, and have characterized the introduction of almost every radical change in transportation. It is wholly a matter of education—not mere ordinary education, but the overcoming of habits of thought vitalized by centuries in the use of draught animals and utterly inapplicable to the problems involved in the application of the new method. As in the case of all labor-saving machinery the very expression should suggest that the fundamental basis of comparison is the “man day.” How much more of your work can be done per day per man with a new contrivance than with the old, and how can the new contrivance be so applied as to make this represent a saving? Where seven years ago there were a dozen to whom every horse drawing a mercantile vehicle was an evidence of waste, there are now thousands, and the day is not far distant, in fact, already come, when in case of failure people have ceased to ask “What's the matter with the vehicle?” but instead “What's the matter with the man who is running it?”