Certain propositions are fundamental, and they are as follows:  Every family should own enough land to support itself at need.  The farms included in the unit must produce enough to meet the needs of the population.  Industry must be so organized that it will normally serve the resident population along every feasible line.  Only such things as cannot be produced at home on account of climatic or soil limitations should be imported from outside.  All necessary professional services should be obtainable within the community itself.  All financial transactions such as loans, credits, banking and insurance should be domestic.  Surplus products, whether agricultural, industrial or professional, should be considered as by-products, and in no case should the producing agency acquire such magnitude that home-consumption becomes a side issue and production for profit take the place of production for use.

All this is absolutely opposed to our present system, but our present system is wasteful, artificial, illogical, unsocial, and therefore vicious.  I have said enough as to the falsities, the dangers and the failures of bulk-production through the operations of capitalism, the factory system and advertising, but its concomitant, the segregation of industries, is equally objectionable.  To ship hogs 1,500 miles to be slaughtered and packed in food form, and then ship this manufactured product back to the source from which the raw material came; to feed a great city with grain, potatoes and fruits coming from 1,000 to 3,000 miles away, and vegetables from a distance of several hundred miles, while the farms within a radius of fifty miles are abandoned and barren; to make all the shoes for the nation in one small area, to spin the wool and cotton and weave the cloth in two or three others; to make the greater part of the furniture in one state, the automobiles in a second and the breakfast food in a third, is so preposterous a proposition that it belongs in Gulliver’s Travels, not in the annals of a supposedly intelligent people.  The only benefit is that which for a time accrued to the railways, which carted raw materials and finished products back and forth over thousands of miles of their lines, the costs of shipment and reshipment being naturally added to the price to the consumer.  The penalties for this uneconomic procedure were borne by society at large, not only in the increased costs but through the abnormal communities, each with its tens of thousands of operatives all engaged in the same work and generally drawn from foreign races (with the active co-operation of the steamship lines), and the permanent dislocation of the labour supply, together with the complete disruption of the social synthesis.