Roadtown

by Edgar Chambless

Roadtown will possess great advantages in this respect where it passes water power and coal fields and can buy them. Roadtown power plants, coöperative stores and cooking plants, will be located where railroads, canals or rivers cross the Roadtown, when practicable, to save the double handling and freight on coal. Otherwise the coal will be loaded into Roadtown cars by steam shovel and hauled at night to the power houses where the monorail coal cars will be dumped directly into the stoker reservoirs. The same heat will be used for generating power, heating the building, cooking the food and for whatever other purpose heat is required and the chimneys of Roadtown will be miles apart. There will be no wagon haulage of fuel in Roadtown life. Other sources of power, such as water, wind or waves, when developed will become available for the Roadtown.

The transmission of Roadtown power will involve none of the losses from which exposed transmission systems suffer because of the weather. The actual cost per horse power used will be far less than in present city distribution.

A Work Room in Every Home.

Every room in Roadtown will be wired for light and power, but the general building plan will presume that all regular industrial operations are to be conducted in a room on the lower floor of the house which will be equipped with power sockets and bolt plates in the floor and a non-vibrating foundation installed for machines. This room will be located where it will have ready access to the transportation lines, probably by a trap through the floor through which a case of goods can be dropped to a position where it can be automatically swung aboard a slowly moving “pick-up” car at night, something after the manner a mail-bag is now snatched from a post beside the railway track.

This work room will be separated from the rest of the house by sound-proof walls. Of course no room can be made absolutely sound proof, for where fresh air goes sound goes also. Very noisy industries as well as those that deal in bulky or malodorous substances must of necessity be out of and at a safe distance from the resident portion of Roadtown. The Roadtown work room, like the coöperative cook shop, though it is there to be used and will be equipped for a work room, yet its use as such is not obligatory. The power socket may be plugged, a rug thrown over the bolt plates and the work room used for a children’s play-room, a sun parlor, a palm garden, or a living-room. It is rented with the house, equipped to receive suitable machines, but if the tenants have other uses for their time, it is their affair.

The following industries will come early to the Roadtown: clothing manufactures, knitting, lace and needle work, millinery, artificial flowers and other decorative work, including all art and the so-called art crafts, jewelry, toilet articles and small household notions of all sorts; wood and cold metal workings, toys, hats, gloves, shoes, book-binding, and many similar types of light manufacturing.

The Roadtown corporation will have machines for suitable Roadtown industries made of certain standard sizes to fit the workroom described. These machines will be for sale or to rent to the tenant. Under the old system of industry, men, constantly fraught with the fear of losing their jobs, are always anxious to buy and own the tools of production. In Roadtown practice there will be nothing to gain by private ownership over publicly owned machines. The corporation will charge just enough rental to maintain and repair the machinery and replace with new ones when the old are out of commission. The operator of the machine will find it more profitable to invest his savings in the bonds of the corporation than to make his own repairs or to replace his own machines. Another advantage of renting your machine is the option you have at all times, that of exchanging it for some other kind of machine.

Whether the factory is brought into the home, or the man induced to go to the factory will, of course, depend upon the nature of his work. Sometimes it will be cheaper to move the product, sometimes cheaper to move the man. In either case the perfected system of transportation is of equal importance.

The selling of farm products coöperatively is practical, as is being abundantly proven in the United States and to a greater extent abroad. There is no valid argument that can be put up against coöperative buying of the raw material and selling of the finished product of the Roadtown workers. Such coöperative buying and selling should not for a moment be classed with the graft tempting work of the municipal or government buyer. In the case of the government the money which is used to buy cavalry horses, for instance, is raised by revenues upon diamonds or cigars. There is here no relation whatsoever between the man who pays the taxes and the buyer of the goods. In coöperative buying the connection between the man who pays and the price that is paid will be close indeed. The buyer of leather for Roadtown glove makers would be held even more closely responsible for honest buying by the consumers of the leather than by the stockholders of a present corporate glove factory, for in the corporation factory there is a chance to hide poor buying behind good selling in the final report to the stockholders. Every move of the buyer and seller of Roadtown workers is then and there made known to the Roadtown workman or group of workmen who has the immediate right to recall the blundering representative. The trouble with government officials is that they are too far removed from the people who supply the money which they spend. In Roadtown that connection will be close and quick in action. It will be corporate industry with interest to small or large investors, but control and profits for and by the workers.

The bondholders will have an ever vigilant and directly interested army of workers who must of necessity safeguard their mutual welfare. The worker cannot avoid this service to the bondholder, hence he is the best protected bondholder in all the world. I do not here refer to values; that is covered elsewhere.