The Roadtown management will have to grow and develop starting perhaps
with one-half mile section and adopt such rules as are necessary to the
protection and comfort of the tenants. They will be consulted about
whatever concerns them directly and thus gradually evolve into a plan
of self-government. When I say self-government I mean as regards the
things that under our present system they haven’t a word to say. They
go to the polls occasionally and vote for somebody but can seldom trace
any benefit from the vote. In Roadtown direct legislation, initiative,
referendum and recall will enable a man to really have a say.
The control of the local affairs in Roadtown will be wholly a matter of
local option and the suffrage will be exercised by both sexes.
There will be no definitely set districts as townships or municipal
wards, but each question to be voted upon will be submitted to the
parties concerned, for illustration: the steward will be elected
or recalled by the people whose food the preparation of which he
superintends. They will also determine his salary. If they vote him
a high salary and he hires an expensive set of helpers and sets a
luxurious table the people who elected him can eject him if they do
not approve of his extravagance, but if they desire to live wastefully
they can do so and the people of more moderate tastes can move into a
section which is known to be moderate. By such opportunity for local
option, people will be given the chance of finding sections to suit
their tastes and purses.
Roadtown will be a great equalizer of present life by the removal of
special privileges of the rich and those who are “in” to reap where
they have not sown, but there will be no tendency to dictate to the
people how they should spend the money they have equitably earned. You
now have to ask the gas trust, the ice trust, the milk and meat trust,
the middlemen’s trust and many others even if it is permissible for you
to marry and live a normal life.
The original price of Roadtown rents will be made to vary with the
desirability of the location. Favored localities will be settled by
people with the money to pay for it, and these people will naturally
vote for high class service and this in turn will be added to the
original price of rent. In this manner certain sections of Roadtown may
become more expensive and so the various grades of society will find
their wants readily supplied.
Roadtown will possess a leveling influence, it will hasten the equality
and brotherhood of man and the Kingdom of God upon the Earth, but it
will not reduce man to a single level at one operation, and if these
natural laws of human nature should be outraged by an enforced leveling
programme, the full Roadtown development would be seriously retarded
for a generation.
_Detached Villas Practical but Undesirable._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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