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.