There is no better illustration of the need for a proper combination of transportation and housing than that of the human body. The baby’s first task is to learn to use its transportation devices, otherwise its house or body is useless. Life is full of lessons of the necessity of the harmonious combination of the functions of transportation and consumption. The monkey was provided with means for transporting himself up the banana tree and an efficient means of getting the banana from the stalk to his mouth. Gold carried from mines in Peru to a jewelry shop in Madrid; men carried from their homes in Brooklyn to their offices in Wall Street; food carried from a farm in Canada to a dining-room in a Boston hotel; gas carried from retorts to the burner in a parlor chandelier; electricity carried from the generator in Niagara to the motors in Rochester; a pound of steak carried by the delivery boy to the basement of your house and pulled up in a dumb-waiter; a letter carried by a postman; the song of a Prima Donna sent scintillating through the air by a wireless phone--all these things and a million others are but a civilized man’s arms and legs--his means of transportation. _Transportation in Nature._ The game of life in wild nature is but the getting of food and water to the consuming plant or animal, or getting the more adaptable animal to the food or water or some warm spot, or the society of his fellows. So the life of man, whether it be the family with the single house or the city with its many houses, shows a similar relation--things needed by the inhabitants, things taken from the place where they are and to a place where we want them--that is transportation. Start out in the morning, number your every minute’s occupation, watch what your neighbors are doing. The man on the stairs, the wagon on the street, the rumbling subway train in a three million dollar a mile right of way, the elevator in the skyscraper, the office boy at beck and call--it is all transportation. Run over in your mind the work of the office and brain workers in a city business section, how many of them are engaging in planning, directing and accounting the various forms of transportation. In fact, every hour of existence we are performing some act of transportation except when asleep. If we allow eight hours for rest we find that two-thirds of our lives are spent in transporting ourselves to our wants or our wants to ourselves. The basic principle of Roadtown is a plan to give the social body proper arms and legs, to make them not as they are, separate and uncoördinated functions, but as part, in fact the most important part, of the scheme of civilization.