Roadtown

by Edgar Chambless

The Roadtown death rate will be the lowest in the history of the world. Roadtown will give the freedom to choose from the work and play of city and country, the exercise and rest, which is necessary to the development of a good physique. The Roadtowner will eat pure food, drink pure water, breathe pure air. His bedding and clothes will be aired and when necessary fumigated. His laundry will be disinfected. His house will be made germ proof. The result will be that consumption and typhoid and pneumonia will disappear with the first generation. A few diseases which are transmitted by contact and the occasional cripples that are born so will persist, but sickness and premature death in Roadtown will be so rare as to cause wonder. Dissipation and the use of patent medicines and narcotic drugs cannot be prevented, but with co-operative industrial organization and no one profiting by the trade, these and other health-destroying fakes will have far less chance to grow or even survive.

The public utilities of Roadtown will include hospitals and nurseries. Public sanitary officers will supervise and consult with residents. Private physicians will be available if there be any demand for them, and when a doctor is wanted he will be able to come quickly. For the liniment and bandage for a cut thumb, a speedier service than the monorail will be available, for the telephone and the mechanical carrier will be brought into play. No one in Roadtown can live more than two or three minutes from the drug store.

With all the coöperative utilities and mechanical perfections that Roadtown offers there is a very natural tendency to associate the essentials of home life with certain forms and locations of houses that our experience connects with the best home life we have known rather than to get down to the real causes and principles involved.

Much of our present sense of house architecture is indeed destined to be quite lost, for the Roadtowner enters his home from above or below, and the pleasurable emotions aroused by the view of one’s cottage as he comes up the walk must be attached to other sensations. But home is a place for companionship as distinct from the swirl of business and the jostle of the crowds; nor is all companionship necessarily human. A lawn to keep and some chickens and garden to care for are far closer to the essence of home than the gable on one’s cottage.

In the first place the Roadtown will be freer from noise than either city or village. There will be no lumbering vehicles and no tramp of either horse or man upon unshielded pavement. All stairs, roof promenade, hallway and monorail platform will be matted; while the noiselessness of the transportation service is one of the fundamental conceptions of Roadtown. There is no clanking furnace in the Roadtown dwelling. There is no common dumb-waiter through which one receives unwelcome knowledge of his neighbor’s business. That the sound will not enter from the roof above or the open windows of one’s neighbor’s was explained in a previous chapter. To be spied upon by one’s neighbors is even more objectionable than to be overheard. In this respect Roadtown is superior to any type of dwelling yet devised, for in all other forms of residence the windows of the house look out upon the street. The Roadtown passersby are above and below and no one may look into the windows unless he is in a private garden. This unique arrangement gives the Roadtown home a sense of privacy and a freedom in the use of light and air now known only upon isolated farms.

The actual nearness of strangers to the Roadtown homes is of no concern, since one has no knowledge of their presence. That we meet them upon the roof promenade or at the monorail station is certainly not an objection.

The Roadtown inhabitants rent of the community, not of a private individual. Such a lease will be permanent as long as the lessee pays the rent and does not offend the rules of the commonwealth. Sales for taxes and arrest for the breaking of the civil law are present limitations to individual liberty, from which the principles of Roadtown departs not one iota, but simply extends it in keeping with the greater number of common projects in which the community is interested.

A Home in the Truest Sense.

The only further sense that attaches to the idea of home is as a protection from the poverty of old age. A plan whereby the Roadtown corporation will give permanent rent to a person who has paid a sufficient sum into the corporation treasury may be developed co-operatively by the tenants. But a place to live in is only half insurance against poverty of old age, and we can hardly doubt that a community trained in coöperation, as the Roadtown community will be trained, will not only ultimately insure its aged inhabitants’ rent but a sufficient sum to keep them in decent comfort. The first generation will never quite forget the egoistic pleasure that is derived from our present forms of deeds for houses and lands, but the sentiment of home ownership as we now know it will die with the generation.

The individual pleasure of house construction will be lost in Roadtown, just as we have already lost the pleasure of vehicle construction. The man who argues that people will not live in Roadtown because they cannot build and own their own homes is a lineal descendant of the man who said they would not ride on railroads for similar reasons. The Roadtown inhabitant will simply transfer his sentiments and put his individuality into other arts. The builder of a modern private railroad car furnishes trucks and couplings which will enable him to be carried by engines and over rails used in common.