Not only will the Roadtown buyer get pure food, but he will get all food at wholesale rates. The frightful waste, due to the putting up of food in small cans, bottles and cartons, is little appreciated. I recently tested this principle by buying olive oil. The oil was priced me at $1.80 a gallon, but the oil I secured in fifty cent bottles I found cost me $7.00 a gallon. Cotton seed oil was priced at sixty cents a gallon. I purchased a five-cent bottle and found that I had paid at the rate of $2.25 a gallon. These are indisputable facts and they could be multiplied indefinitely. In barrel or car lots the above gallon prices would be greatly reduced. All Roadtown foods can be bought in bulk direct from the makers at makers’ rates. The vegetables will be crisp and fresh from the Roadtown gardens. The profits of the middlemen, of retailers, of adulterators and advertisers, the cost of bottles and cans, of delivery boys and bad grocery bills will certainly be eliminated with one fell swoop. It will reduce the cost of living, mark you, at such a rate that the unsophisticated will confuse a Roadtown meal with a charitable soup kitchen. But if you don’t believe this, write to your country cousins and find out just what is the producer’s price on the material out of which a meal is made. CHAPTER VII THE SERVANT PROBLEM IN ROADTOWN There will be no servant problem in Roadtown, as there will be no need for servants. CHAPTER VIII ROADTOWN AGRICULTURE. Market gardens near our cities are worth several hundreds of dollars per acre. But there are millions of acres of land more fertile than a Brooklyn market garden that cannot be used because there is no way to get fertilizer to it or products away. Transportation is more important to land values than fertility. A modern city of a hundred thousand inhabitants is about six miles in diameter, within “an air line” mile of the edge of that city will be about twenty square miles of land, but this land will average three and one half miles from the markets which are usually clustered in the center of the city, but if the street system is of the checker-board type, the edge of the city between the compass points will be five miles by street from the markets. A Roadtown with a hundred thousand inhabitants will have within a mile of its house line “edge,” or “center,” two hundred square miles of land area, ten times as much as in the above case, and this land will average but half a mile from the market to which the gardener must needs transport his produce, which is only one-tenth the distance under the present day conditions. Another advantage of Roadtown for intensive agricultural development is that, because of the numerous other functions that transportation is to serve, Roadtown agriculture has a perfected system of transportation immediately at its service to say nothing of an immense consuming population on the line.