Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/805

 PUBLIC OWNERSHIP VERSUS PUBLIC CONTROL 7*9

public sentiment has become impatient of all such obviously specious reasoning in defiance of known facts. Competition between transportation lines, or gas and electric-light companies, or telephone systems, usually ends either in a price agreement, or a division of territory, or an outright consolidation of the rival corporations. Massachusetts has frankly recognized the humbug of competition in certain of these fields, and has even gone to the extent, as a recent decision of its Board of Railroad Commis- sioners, in a case at Springfield, witnesses, of declaring virtually that the monopoly is advantageous and should be protected; but such an expression from the source quoted must always be taken in connection with the all-important proviso that the monopoly operates under a very strict and comprehensive system of public control, and this is precisely what Massachusetts laws provide.

Here is where the real issue lies today. There is less and less effort to galvanize the corpse of competition in the public-service facilities of our cities, either in practice or in theory. Equally, there is less and less disposition to deny the public right to supply in some way the safeguards which competition would naturally afford if it were actually there. The vital question is on the how. And here begins the cleavage between the public-ownership proposition and public control.

It will be of interest to inquire into some of the experience of recent years, under both systems, in this country and abroad. So far as strictly municipal undertakings are concerned, Great Britain furnishes practically all the advanced experiments of large importance, and unfortunately the differences of opinion as to practical results are so pronounced, and the testimony so con- flicting, that positive conclusions are in many cases difficult. Not only this, but in forming judgments very much depends upon whether the results under municipal operation at a given time are compared with previous private-management experience in the same community, or with present American experience under private management.

Take, for example, the famous case of Glasgow. The tracks of the street-railway system were the property of the city from the beginning, but were leased in 1871 to the Glasgow Tramway