Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/835

 COLLECTIVE TELESIS 819

tische Nachrichten ron den preussischen Eisenbahncn], usually several years behind date, and searched carefully through their compli- cated columns for all possible facts bearing on the sociological side. The year 1874 was well adapted to this, the state man- agement having then extended to about as large a number of lines as were still in the hands of the companies. I selected the columns for freight and passenger rates, happily, given and wanting in the statistics of nearly or quite all other countries. I worked these up for that year and gave the result in a foot- note to page 581 of the second volume of my book. The general result, as there shown, was that "while the roads owned and worked by companies yielded 13.7 per cent, greater profits than those owned and worked by the state, the latter carried passengers 9.4 and freight 15 per cent, cheaper than the former." One other example will be merely referred to, because its elaboration would occupy too much space. The Bulletin of the Department of Labor, No. 7, for November 1896 contains a most important study by Ethelbert Stewart on " Rates of Wages Paid under Public and Private Contract." The title, however, is misleading, because in addition to rates paid under contract it includes those paid by municipalities themselves. It is a comparison of these, where they exist, with those paid by con- tractors, whether public or private, that furnishes interesting matter for the sociologist. A glance at the tables given for Baltimore, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia is sufficient to show that in nearly all the leading industries the municipalities pay higher wages than either contractors or private companies. These and similar investigations are being conducted by the Bureau of Labor and by the census. In scarcely any other way could they be made, since private enterprise has no incentive to conduct strictly sociological investigations such as this one pre- eminently is. They can afford to study only the economic side to ascertain whether any enterprise is profitable to its managers. Public considerations are wholly foreign t<> their interests. But the state, as already remarked, is essentially benevolent, and all its operations, however shortsighted and fruitless, aim at least