Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/806

 790 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

& Omnibus Co., for twenty-three years. On November 12, 1891, the Town Council voted not to renew the lease, and entered into negotiations with the company for the purchase of its equipment. These negotiations fell through, and the municipality thereupon purchased an entire new outfit for a horse-car line cars and horses, barns, ground, buildings, and machinery. Why was not an electric system installed, as it certainly would have been by any American private corporation taking possession of an urban transportation system so recently as 1894?

Mr. J. Shaw Maxwell, in a review of municipal-ownership experiments, in the Co-operative Wholesale Societies' Annual for 1902, says it was because there was not time enough in the two years after the negotiations with the private company collapsed to the date when the city had to begin operation, to purchase and install an electric plant. A different explanation is indicated in the very exhaustive and favorable account of the Glasgow tramways, to which the Light Railway and Tramway Journal (London) devoted almost its entire space in the issue of July 3, 1903. It appears that a special committee was appointed as early as July, 1891, to investigate methods of operation for the tramways, and a month later reported in favor of "mechanical traction;" but they could not agree on whether it should be electric, cable, compressed-air, or gas-motor.

The subcommittee were busy considering the question until after the following May, when they decided that it would be impracticable to start the service with mechanical traction, and that the safest course would be to start with horses and wait further developments in regard to the various forms of traction.

In October, 1902,

offers were received for erecting and completing an electric installation, with all plant, appliances, rolling-stock, etc., necessary for working about eight miles of the tramways in the northern part of the city, including the Spring- burn route, on the overhead system, but the committee did not then see their way to recommend the acceptance of any of the offers.

Not until five years later was even a short experimental line authorized, and the principal reason seems to have been that " there was as yet no general consensus of opinion as to which was the best system of mechanical traction." The first test-line was