But their bosses with appetites whetted to luxury will be
out of a job “for fair” for with the exception of the mines and foreign
commerce, the Roadtown will leave them no chance to graft off the
producer and consumer by the aid of a privately owned and barbarously
inefficient mechanism of distribution and house construction.
Verily, there will be weeping and wailing, and soft hands blistered,
and fair names of the privileged families without prestige in the
world, for the trusts will have lost their jobs, and there will be but
one trust, and that will be owned by the people.
_Shall we Miss Them?_
The Roadtown is remarkable for the new things that it will add to
civilization, but it is even more remarkable for the things that will
be conspicuous for their absence. In the Roadtown there will be no
streets, no street cars and no “subway air”; no kitchens, no coal bins,
no back yards or back alleys full of crime and tin cans; no brooms, no
feather dusters, no wash day; no clothes line, no beating the carpet
or shaking the rug out the window; there will be no clothes brushes,
no pressing clothes by hand, no lugging the beds out to air them;
the Roadtown home will have no dish washing, no cooks, no maids, no
janitors, no furnace, no ashes, no dust, no noise, no kindling to
split nor buy for five cents a bundle; there will be no moving vans,
no coal wagons, no ice wagons, no garbage carts, no ash carts, no milk
wagons, and no delivery wagons; no horses except for pleasure drives
and no need for a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals;
in Roadtown there will be no fire engines, no cabs nor taxi-cabs, no
mixing of pedestrians and vehicles, no street car blockades, no grade
crossings and no “death avenues”; there will be no bargain rushes, no
small shops, no middleman’s profits, no bill boards, no advertising
of useless and harmful articles, no waste of money for little bottles
and cans and bags, no adulterated food, no wilted vegetables, no
unsanitary “loose” milk, no systems of cesspools and wells to spread
typhoid and other disease germs; for the Roadtown farmer there will
be no hitching the horse to go to church nor driving to town to get
the mail, no kerosene lamps, no slipshod ungraded country school, no
lightning rod peddlers and no book agents; in Roadtown there will be
no need for umbrellas, rubbers nor overcoats in the daily routine of
business--such protection from the weather being only required by the
keepers of live stock and upon occasional visits to the old style city;
there will be no snow to shovel, no slipping of horses or humans on icy
streets, no street cleaners, no water wagons, no swill tubs, no rain
barrels, no manure carts, no dumb-waiters to pull up, no popping and
sizzling steam radiators (hot water heating instead); no beds to make,
no expensive strings of funeral carriages, no fire escapes, no waiting
in rain or snow to catch a car, no canned goods, no delicatessen diet;
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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