You might ask, what will be the ultimate place of the Roadtown in the civilization of the world? The answer is as impossible as would have been an answer to the ultimate place of the railroad in the civilization of the world had that question been proposed seventy years ago. The railroad is a great civilizer. It carries with it all the material aids to civilization that can be hauled in a freight car. The Roadtown carries into the home what the railroad takes only to the freight and express office, and it carries in addition the civilization of pipes and wires which the railroad cannot transport. It would have been a wonderful vision for a man of the first quarter of the last century to have attempted to picture the ultimate effect of the railroad--but his vision would have fallen short of the reality. Try for a moment now to take the railroad out of civilization and substitute the methods of 1825. I believe the Roadtown will be to the twentieth century what the railroad was to the nineteenth and that my present efforts to predict its future would fall just as far short of the reality as would Stevenson’s dream of the railroad civilization of to-day. CHAPTER XIII IN ROADTOWN THERE WILL BE NO TRUSTS The only effective way to fight the trusts is to cease to patronize them and the only way to cease to patronize them is to move into an environment which is more economically efficient. Every labor saving invention in the history of man has thrown someone out of work. The grain binders were broken and burned by the old fashioned harvest hands. The hand type-setters opposed the introduction of the linotype. But the economic invention came in spite of this opposition. The Roadtown is a new arrangement of civilization, a new plan for all commerce and all city building; it will do for the entire programme of transportation what the linotype did for the type setting industry. The entire industrial life of the world will desert the present economic system just as the farmers deserted the old scythes and flails. As a result a large proportion of the people who now work with the crude systems will be thrown out of employment. Who are these people? They are teamsters and expressmen, and clerks, messengers, and bookkeepers, and others too numerous to mention, but these people are merely the servants of private corporations. And the corporations own the warehouses, wholesale and retail stores, and the little shops, and street cars, and cabs, and conduits, and the gas and electricity, and hundreds of other things. These, corporation or trust owners, and their political henchmen who live on the fat of the land and who by employing a lot of servants distribute our goods and intelligence to us by a crude, wasteful, dishonest, and disorganized system, will also eventually lose their jobs. The men who drive the wagons will learn to raise vegetables, and the girls behind the hat counters will learn to make hats.