Electric light, coal and the other things a man has to pay for in any town are charged for here, but it doesn't take a legislative fight or a big row in the newspapers to keep the price down where a man can afford to pay it. Water is supplied free. The idea is that the man owes the company nothing but good work in return for his pay. After quitting time he's his own boss. The company tries to make life in the town pleasant enough so that he'll be glad to live there, and think he has a good job. And it recognizes that life has many sides.
It was in pursuance of the general thesis that when the town opened it had a hotel with a bar. "There's no use," they said, "in trying to make a mollycoddle out of a mill man. When he wants a drink he's going to get it, especially the foreign born. We don't propose to pick his drinks for him. If he wants whiskey it's a good sight better for us that he should be able to get it here like a human being than to trail into Trenton and take a chance with the stuff that goes over the bars where a workingman drinks. The whiskey here isn't gilt-edged, but it's decent, and it's worth what it costs."
Prohibition settled the drink question, but while the cafe lasted in Roebling it kept the men from going to town to battle with the "embalming fluid," and not showing up for the customary three days. That too was good business.
After the dirt and noise and disorder of a city street, it is like a sedative to slip from the train into the peace and the wide spaces of Roebling. The tidy station is at one side, at the other, beyond the switch tracks, the little gate-house which gives ingress to the mill enclosure--if you have the proper kind of pass. From here a trim concrete walk leads on past the ground of the plant and its fence of tall pickets, toward the river, and the town. As you go, you meet with courtesy. It is not drawing the long bow to say everybody in Roebling--outwardly at least--is civil and good natured. Just beyond the mill grounds you come upon the police office, with trig coppers who seem to have very little to do. Like the shining fire engines, which stand in the adjoining building ready for service either in town or plant, they seem to be maintained chiefly for insurance and ornament. But they are practical organizations at that. The Roebling Company learned what fire was during the war, when two of the biggest buildings in the Upper Works were destroyed.