Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/803

 PUBLIC OWNERSHIP VERSUS PUBLIC CONTROL

When it was first announced that the Citizens' Union of New York was entering upon a campaign to increase the range of municipal powers so as to include ownership and operation, among other things, of street railways, gas and electric-light service, it was regarded as something of a politico-economic sensa- tion. The extraordinary feature was not the character of the proposition itself. Municipal ownership is no novelty, either as a theory in this country or as a practical accomplishment in Europe, especially in Great Britain. But that an organization of the civic prominence and influence of the Citizens' Union should select the opening months of a new Tammany administration to start the machinery at the state capitol for a constitutional amendment per- mitting these new city functions, was unique in American political history, to say the least.

Had the last municipal election in New York continued the reform administration in office, a suggestion for adding an immense new set of complex responsibilities and powers to the city government's activities certainly would have seemed less eccentric than coming, as it did, close upon the heels of the most striking demonstration ever afforded of the insecurity of clean, able, and nonpartisan government in the great "social experi- ment" city of the New World.

But these are points of political expediency rather than of principles at stake. The larger importance of any such move- ment does not lie in the sensational interest of an unpropitious launching, but in the fact that it raises again (and each time more seriously, whatever the outcome of the particular agitation) the issue of the wisdom and practical feasibility of taking the govern- ment into these exacting and complicated fields of industrial responsibility and management. This is, indeed, a large issue; and if a fresh discussion of it leads to nothing more concrete than the remedying of certain abuses in existing systems, and establish- ing more equitable and satisfactory relations between the com-

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