IN ROADTOWN THERE WILL BE NO TRUSTS
The only effective way to fight the trusts is to cease to patronize
them and the only way to cease to patronize them is to move into an
environment which is more economically efficient.
Every labor saving invention in the history of man has thrown someone
out of work. The grain binders were broken and burned by the old
fashioned harvest hands. The hand type-setters opposed the introduction
of the linotype. But the economic invention came in spite of this
opposition. The Roadtown is a new arrangement of civilization, a new
plan for all commerce and all city building; it will do for the entire
programme of transportation what the linotype did for the type setting
industry. The entire industrial life of the world will desert the
present economic system just as the farmers deserted the old scythes
and flails. As a result a large proportion of the people who now work
with the crude systems will be thrown out of employment. Who are these
people? They are teamsters and expressmen, and clerks, messengers, and
bookkeepers, and others too numerous to mention, but these people are
merely the servants of private corporations. And the corporations own
the warehouses, wholesale and retail stores, and the little shops,
and street cars, and cabs, and conduits, and the gas and electricity,
and hundreds of other things. These, corporation or trust owners, and
their political henchmen who live on the fat of the land and who by
employing a lot of servants distribute our goods and intelligence to
us by a crude, wasteful, dishonest, and disorganized system, will also
eventually lose their jobs. The men who drive the wagons will learn to
raise vegetables, and the girls behind the hat counters will learn to
make hats. But their bosses with appetites whetted to luxury will be
out of a job “for fair” for with the exception of the mines and foreign
commerce, the Roadtown will leave them no chance to graft off the
producer and consumer by the aid of a privately owned and barbarously
inefficient mechanism of distribution and house construction.
Verily, there will be weeping and wailing, and soft hands blistered,
and fair names of the privileged families without prestige in the
world, for the trusts will have lost their jobs, and there will be but
one trust, and that will be owned by the people.
_Shall we Miss Them?_
The Roadtown is remarkable for the new things that it will add to
civilization, but it is even more remarkable for the things that will
be conspicuous for their absence. In the Roadtown there will be no
streets, no street cars and no “subway air”; no kitchens, no coal bins,
no back yards or back alleys full of crime and tin cans; no brooms, no
feather dusters, no wash day; no clothes line, no beating the carpet
or shaking the rug out the window; there will be no clothes brushes,
no pressing clothes by hand, no lugging the beds out to air them;
the Roadtown home will have no dish washing, no cooks, no maids, no
janitors, no furnace, no ashes, no dust, no noise, no kindling to
split nor buy for five cents a bundle; there will be no moving vans,
no coal wagons, no ice wagons, no garbage carts, no ash carts, no milk
wagons, and no delivery wagons; no horses except for pleasure drives
and no need for a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals;
in Roadtown there will be no fire engines, no cabs nor taxi-cabs, no
mixing of pedestrians and vehicles, no street car blockades, no grade
crossings and no “death avenues”; there will be no bargain rushes, no
small shops, no middleman’s profits, no bill boards, no advertising
of useless and harmful articles, no waste of money for little bottles
and cans and bags, no adulterated food, no wilted vegetables, no
unsanitary “loose” milk, no systems of cesspools and wells to spread
typhoid and other disease germs; for the Roadtown farmer there will
be no hitching the horse to go to church nor driving to town to get
the mail, no kerosene lamps, no slipshod ungraded country school, no
lightning rod peddlers and no book agents; in Roadtown there will be
no need for umbrellas, rubbers nor overcoats in the daily routine of
business--such protection from the weather being only required by the
keepers of live stock and upon occasional visits to the old style city;
there will be no snow to shovel, no slipping of horses or humans on icy
streets, no street cleaners, no water wagons, no swill tubs, no rain
barrels, no manure carts, no dumb-waiters to pull up, no popping and
sizzling steam radiators (hot water heating instead); no beds to make,
no expensive strings of funeral carriages, no fire escapes, no waiting
in rain or snow to catch a car, no canned goods, no delicatessen diet;
in the Roadtown there will be no unemployed problem and no men out of a
job except those who are too lazy to work, and yet there will be many
changes in occupation, for the Roadtown will have no news boys, no
messenger boys, no mail carriers, no traffic policemen, no teamsters,
no cabbies, no street car conductors, no expressmen, no delivery boys,
no peddlers, no push cart men, no waiters to tip, no insurance agents;
no organ grinders, no rag pickers nor old clothes men, no street fakirs
nor sandwich men; no beggars, no liveried flunkies; no sweat shops, no
child labor, no wage slavery, no rent on fictitious land values, and no
trusts to gobble up the fruits of labor.
The history of civilization shows that mechanics control economics,
that economics control morality, and that the morality of the time is
expressed through the law; and conversely law does not control morality
nor morality economics nor economics mechanics. Mechanics is the
foundation of all that is good and bad in civilization, law the paint
on the finished structure. The painters who are constantly retouching
the exterior get credit for a good deal of change but their work is
of little real moment compared with the changing of the fundamental
structure.
_The Roadtown Religion._
A tremendous step toward the perfection of civilization will be made
when the world recognizes the two following principles:
(1) That cities should be built in long continuous lines.
(2) That housing, as a _framework_, and scientific transportation, as
a _compact mechanism_ to fit therein, should be developed as a single
enterprise.
The Roadtown will tend to perfect transportation as applied to people,
commodities and intelligence. Highly perfected transportation means
opportunity to get together or to get apart. It means socialism for
the socialist, together with all the advantages of individualism, and
individualism for the individualist, together with all the advantages
of coöperation.
The mission of the Roadtown is to assist in the development of the
physical, mental and moral qualities of mankind through the gradual
elimination of all physical, mental and moral waste, thus creating
an environment where selfishness and inequality of opportunity will
gradually disappear and where man will finally enjoy all the fruits of
his labor.
The above expresses the principles of the Roadtown religion--a faith
which holds that the Kingdom of God can be realized on this earth and
points a practical way by which such realization may be attained.
If you accept these principles and can add them to the faith of your
present religion you are indeed a Roadtowner.
The Roadtown is as humanitarian and revolutionary in its principles
as is Single Tax or Socialism and like these is destined to become a
great social movement enlisting the minds and hearts of those who have
developed the social conscience--who believe in it and are willing to
work for a civilization wherein the equitable distribution of wealth
may be realized. But these other movements depend for their results
largely upon the conversion of the majority of the population to
their creeds. Roadtown will be a great social “movement” but it will
be more than a movement--it will be a realization and that speedily.
In fact the object of the author in painfully preparing this little
volume (for I am a round peg in a square hole at book writing) is
to lay the Roadtown plan before the public to a degree that will
stimulate the active interest of enough people to accomplish through
their coöperation the financing, and building the first section of
Roadtown. The first section built, no human power can stop the Roadtown
revolution.
So if you find in the spirit of Roadtown a response to the feeling
within your own soul write to the author that you may be counted upon
as a Roadtowner to believe and to perform.
If you do not understand the mechanics of Roadtown, write. There
are engineers who do and who can explain this to you. If you are an
architect or an engineer, an inventor or an agriculturist with a
criticism or practical idea that will make Roadtown better, write. If
you live in a locality suitable for the construction of a Roadtown
line, write. If you know of any one else who can help the cause write
to them to write.
Whether you be preacher, carpenter or publicist; bookkeeper, broker
or blacksmith, if you wish to play a part in founding the new
civilization, talk, preach, speak, write or publish the Roadtown
gospel. Send the book to one friend and advise the rest to buy it.
Write an article on the subject and get your editor friend to publish
it.
If you fear that the crookedness of finance that has blackened many
a fair gift to humanity may smirch this latest boon--make it your
business to investigate fully; consult with men of wide experience and
unquestionable honor who are well posted on this particular subject who
may help you to establish in your mind the true nature and phenomenal
significance of this movement. And above all if you are but a man among
men toiling at your allotted task and taking the stinted portion which
the “system” allows you, write, that your name may be filed on the
waiting list as one of those to whom the occupancy of a Roadtown house
may be offered as soon as the cement of the first section has hardened
and the civilizing currents have been turned into the arteries of “A
New Heaven and A New Earth” here on this God plowed and human harrowed
planet in this the early years of the Twentieth Century.
THE END
Transcriber’s Note:
Variations in spelling, computations in the table on page 154,
and word usage in "rent of the community, not of a private" on
page 136 have been retained as published in the original.
Changes have been made as follows:
Page 51
accomplisment of which lies on my desk _changed to_
accomplishment of which lies on my desk
Page 87
woefuly ignorant of the whole _changed to_
woefully ignorant of the whole
Page 92
dear parks and land held by speculators _changed to_
deer parks and land held by speculators
Page 120
foregoing sentence consists of eighteen words _changed to_
foregoing sentence consists of fifteen words
Page 123
better the transportation facilites _changed to_
better the transportation facilities