Our factories and our farms—the places of production—our houses and cities—places of consumption, and our railroad trucks, delivery wagons and dumb-waiters, means of transportation, have been developed by separate minds—they work together—clumsily—wastefully. Civilization is a black cabinet of plates and doughnuts, arms and legs, and consuming mouths dancing around in an uncoördinated fashion, occasionally getting together and serving each other, but more often missing the mark—two hands going to one mouth, another hand missing the mouth altogether; there is no plan, no unity, no harmony, no mind behind it all. The farm and factory, the railroad and the city grow separately, each to serve the other it is true, but the machine as a whole is woefully disjointed and inefficient. We may liken our present system of living to old style harvesting. A binder, wonderful enough in itself, left the bundles of grain strewn about the field. They were shocked by hand. Later they are gathered into wagons and hauled to the farm yard and built into stacks. Then the thresher comes and with another complex machine delivers the grain, loose, through a running spout, where men weigh it and sack it and load it into wagons, which are as crude as the threshing machine itself.
Compare this system, wonderful though it be, with the combined header-thresher, which at one operation cuts, threshes and delivers the grain weighed and sacked into the wagon. In the combination of the previous operations many of the steps, the binding and hauling and stacking and weighing drop out. The machine simplified the whole process, it eliminates waste, it represents a unity of plan, a harmony of operation.
Our modern complex systems of production, transportation and consumption, like the old-fashioned method of harvesting, require many separate machines. Take the one product of butter for illustration: the farmer produces milk, the milk hauler carts it to town, the creamery man manufactures the butter, then packs it into tubs and sells it to a dealer; the dealer ships it to the city by rail and then another truckman delivers it to a jobber which means more trucking; the jobber molds the butter into prints and boxes them. A wagon takes it to a grocer where it is again stored, sold, and goes the round of another wagon, a dumb-waiter, a pantry, a waiter, a table, and at last consumption. This is a sample story of civilization, a heterogeneous mass of independently acting individuals and separate mechanisms, full of mechanical waste, full of human waste, full of financial waste. The butter fat as is now wastefully produced is worth twenty cents in the farmer’s milk pail, it cost two cents to skim it and churn it, the rest is transportation. It is worth forty cents at the grocery store and fifty cents to one dollar on your table, according to how much of your household distribution is done by your wife who gives services gratis and how much by servants whose arms and legs move only in response to the rattle of the shekels. And how much would this service of transportation cost if production, transportation and consumption, like the modern header-thresher, were built upon a plan of coördination, that is, if the farmer’s dairy was on a transportation line with the creamery, and the creamery on a line with the kitchen where machinery and specialized labor are available, and the kitchen was on a line with the consumer’s dining-room, and the only expense of transportation was the cost of power to move the material object and the cost of labor to perform the actual processes of manufacture that intervene between production and consumption.
The Roadtown is a single unified plan for the arrangement of these three functions of civilization—production, transportation, and consumption.
CHAPTER III
LINE DISTRIBUTION—THE LOGICAL OUTCOME
CIVILIZATION growing up in a separate and disjoined fashion has resulted in a certain arrangement of the population upon the face of the earth. At first savage men roamed the plains and forests seeking food. The advent of civilization, industrial and social coöperation, taught men the advantage of gathering themselves into cities. At first these cities were provisioned from the country by means of humans or animal beasts of burden, then water transportation caused the development of greater cities on rivers and harbors. With the advent of the railroad, together with the transportation agencies already mentioned, the provisioning of cities became limited only by the ability of the country district to support its own population and that of the city.
The occupation of the city people was chiefly that of manufacturing, trading and grafting on the farmer and on each other. The invention of steam power made it economical to assemble workmen into large factories which added another cause to the growth of cities. The use of this steam power forced the city worker out of his home and into the more economical factory, thus developing the factory system.
The continual growth of cities soon filled the land with large groups of houses, crowding each other for room. As the houses were built closer and closer together, the amount of light and air was shut out, in order that the distance the workers lived from their work might not increase. At first workers went from their work to their houses on foot, later by means of the horse car, still later by steam car and now the electric car is supreme. As these transportation facilities first used to get provisions into the city and the manufactured product out of it were utilized to get the workers to and from their work, the houses began to follow the transportation lines.