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THE LEAGUE OF AMERICAN WHEELMEN

is an organization to promote the general interests of cycling; to ascertain, defend, and protect the rights of wheelmen, to encourage and facilitate touring, to promote the improvement of the public highways and an intelligent care and repair of the same, to promote and regulate cycle racing by amateur contestants on the track, and to regulate the government of all other amateur sports connected with the use of the wheel.

Genial companionship, easy intercommunication, mutual protection and defense, sensible laws and reasonable administration of them, good roads, constructed and kept in repair with intelligence after the most approved methods, and some degree of freedom in the use of them, comfortable hotels and moderate charges; these are indispensable auxiliaries to the progress and safety of cycling. In such matters the individual wheelman is powerless and the ordinary club ineffective: but a league of many thousand cyclists can exercise a great influence in obtaining public recognition of what wheelmen want and in promoting the success and increasing the popularity of cycling.

The moral force of numbers is incalculable. In this age the effort of the individual counts for less and less, and the concerted efforts of many for more and more. Often when the public, or even local boards and councils take little notice of one rider or of a club of several, they can see the national organization extending into their legal and political neighborhoods without glasses. Even one wheelman with the League ready organized to back him is, if not a majority, at least a minority of sufficient consequence to be respected. The presence even of this body of thousands combined and officered for the purpose of securing rights has been found very potent by those who have been in positions practically to know.