Thus far we have discussed agriculture and manufacturing as industries to be engaged in by different sets of workers. In practice, I believe they will be bountifully intermingled. A man may work at a shoe stitcher for three hours, turn off the power and go out and hoe potatoes. Likewise his wife may run the same machine, or a lace machine for a while, and for a change of occupation operate the electric hoe (something on the order of a dentist’s drill, only much larger) in the vegetable or flower garden. Not only will Roadtown free the factory worker from wage slavery, but it will free both farmer and machine worker from long hours of toil at monotonous work. It will free our civilization from the curse of making machines out of men; it will sift out the indolent and place them at the bottom of the scale of life’s good things. It will reward the industrious as much as man can be rewarded without being given power to enslave his fellows. It will make men free; it will abolish machine men, factory and sweat shops, and child labor and woman’s economic dependence on man that makes her a sexual slave. And such work, such making of children into men and women instead of automatons, may lessen the speed at which some machines are fed, and may even make tissue paper flowers on hats dearer, but it will certainly make cow butter and big red apples cheaper and real flowers more abundant and raise the per capita valuation of human life. CHAPTER X ROADTOWN MAKES CO-OPERATION PRACTICAL In the modern world there is no such thing as an absolute individualist, or an absolute coöperationist. The most rabid enemy of socialistic and coöperative movements sends his children to a coöperative school, puts his mail in a coöperative post office, and pays the coöperative preachers; he drinks coöperative water and uses the coöperative sewage system and drives his automobile on a coöperative road. On the other hand, the most enthusiastic socialist wants to write his own books and paint his own pictures and sign his name to them and get the glory. Why, then, should the poultry breeder, or the skilled bookbinder cast the individuality of his labor into the melting pot of coöperative production? In Roadtown the lamb of socialism shall lie down with the leopard of individuality and a child of the common good shall lead them. _A Mecca for the Individualist._