Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/355

 the private benefit of their owners in contempt of public right; the service was secondary.

We may say that this third era is the era of regulation, or, as it is more apt to be, attempted regulation, by the city, in which the principle of the public interest as paramount to the private interest is to be the basis on which a private company shall be permitted to operate. This era will endure long enough to demonstrate itself a failure, the general mind will continue to learn, to inform itself, democracy will develop new functions, and we shall enter on the fourth, and perhaps the final stage, that of municipal ownership.

LX

We came upon the scene just when the discussion was emerging from the second into the third of those phases into which I have divided the development of the problem. The franchises granted almost a generation before were about to expire, and new arrangements between the city and the traction company, the Big Con, as the newspaper argot would have it. Chicago had already, or almost, gone through her settlement; and though the settlement was pretty bad, it nevertheless recognized the principle that the value of a street railway franchise is a public, social, or communal value, produced by the community, and therefore belonged to the community. In Toledo the company had but about $5,000,000 of actual investment, while it