Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/809

 PUBLIC OWNERSHIP VERSUS PUBLIC CONTROL 793

of honorable repute, business experience, and capacity for public service; and but for this fact it is altogether probable that the experiments would have proved disastrous failures. To cite a few cases by way of illustrating the average composition of the governing bodies of English municipalities: in 1901 the City Council of Birmingham contained forty manufacturers and tradesmen associated with the metal and cutlery trades ; in Brom- ley nearly half the members were manufacturers and tradesmen, connected chiefly with the cotton industry; in Hull the shipping interests were strongly represented; in Huddersfield woolen manufacturers were prominent; in Sheffield the staple industry was represented in all its phases, from corporation directors to steel-workers and molders ; in Glasgow the municipal corporation consisted of twenty-one merchants and shopkeepers, twenty-six manufacturers and tradesmen, sixteen professional men, four following no calling, while the great trading interests of the city were well represented.

In spite of all the favorable features, public opinion in Great Britain, while strongly tending toward municipal ownership in many quarters, is by no means a unit on the practical results achieved down to date. Mr. Maxwell himself, although a believer in municipalization, quotes a number of critical judgments; for example, that of Mr. Benjamin Taylor, in the electric railway number of Cassier's Magazine, that " generally speaking, the most perfect tramway system is procurable when the municipality owns the track and leases the lines to a company under municipal regulations." Mr. Taylor reviewed the experience of Glasgow, Huddersfield, Blackpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and Plymouth, and expressed the conviction that

In no single instance has it [municipal operation] been perfectly successful. Glasgow furnishes the nearest approach to success, but in Glasgow, with a small track for an enormous dependent population, it would take very bad

management indeed to produce financial failure Any well-managed

company, in possession of the advantages which any of these corporations [municipalities] whose work has been reviewed, possesses, would have, long ere this, produced much better results both for itself and for the public.

Whatever may be the conclusion, however, as to public versus private tramways in Great Britain, when we compare the results