Josiah Warren
Practical Applications of the Elementary Principles of "True Civilization", to the Minute Details of Every Day Life. Being Part III, the Last of the "True Civilization" Series.... (Princeton, Mass.: Published by the Author, 1873):45-47.
After pursuing an early career as a musician, orchestra leader, and teacher of music in Cincinnati, and then as the owner of a lamp factory, Warren (ca. 1798-1874) joined the ranks of those who followed Robert Owen and moved to New Harmony, Indiana in 1825. There he developed the theory of a society whose economy was to be based on the exchange of goods at cost. In Cincinnati in 1827 he began an "equity store," selling it two years later at no profit. As early as 1821 he received his first patent, and in the 1830s and 1840s he developed several improvements in printing presses, type, and stereotype plates. In 1850 he moved to New York, and on Long Island he and an associate, Stephen Pearl Andrews, founded the town of Modern Times, a community that housed other reformers and eccentrics until the Civil War. From one J. Madison Allen he borrowed the plan that he felt illustrated the sketchy principles of town layout he laid down in this document. Of Allen nothing has yet been located. His design for a matrix of hexagonal neighborhoods may be the earliest such proposal. This principle would be revived later by others, notably Charles Rollinson Lamb in his article of 1904 in The Craftsman, Rudolf Müller of Vienna in 1908, and--in his entry in the competition of 1911 for the design of the Australian capital city--Arthur B. Wood.1, While securing to every settler all the land that can be necessary to him or her (when labor is properly paid) to positively cut off the power to monopolize the soil.
2, Positive security against desolating fires.
3, Security against the spread of contagious diseases.
4, To secure as far as possible, to every one,; the choice, at all times, of their own immediate surroundings and companionship or neighbors.
5, To give every one, as nearly as possible, Equal advantages of Locality, in regard to public resorts and places of business.
6, The distances from dwellings, to places of business to be short as practicable while preserving sufficient room to avoid mutual disturbance.
7, to give equal facilities for the use of the roads.
8, to be able to begin in a small way, yet complete in itself, so that growth will be only a repetition of what has already been done, and given satisfaction, and which can be continuously extended outwards; so that enlarging will not compel emigrations to remote regions, deprived of all the conveniences that habit has rendered necessary--perhaps to die of new peculiarities of climate, or hard work without help.
9, The world needs free play for experiments in life. almost every thinker has some favorite ideas to try, but only one can be tried at one time by any body of people, and there is but little chance of getting the consent of all to any thing new or untried. If a new project can find a half a dozen advocates, it is unusually fortunate: If a hundred experiments were going on at once, there might be fifty times the progress that there would be with only one. To attain this very desirable end, it should be practicable for the few advocates of any new project to try it without involving any others in risks, expenses, or responsibilities or disturbances of any kind, and yet all might benefit by the results of such experiments, either positively, or negatively as warnings.
It is believed that the following plan (furnished by J. Madison Allen,
of Ancora, N.J.) would enable us to attain all these ends, and some other
advantages.
