Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/356

 had a capitalization in stocks and bonds of nearly $30,000,000, and the difference of $25,000,000 was the community value which the magnates had been exploiting for their own benefit. We simply proposed that this value should be returned to the people. We proposed, then, that the rate of fare to be charged by the company should be large enough and only large enough to pay a reasonable return on the actual investment and to provide good service, a service that was to be dictated, regulated and controlled by the city. This principle had been established, or at least admitted in the Chicago settlement, and the same thing had been done, though on a sounder and more scientific basis in Cleveland, where Tom Johnson's long and gallant and intelligent contest already in effect had been won. Over in Detroit the same principles had been deduced, though the discussion there was so prolonged, as proved ultimately to be the case in Toledo, that the people demanded municipal ownership, without passing through the intervening experimental stage of regulation and control.

There is of course nothing sacrosanct in three-cent fares. The movement of the people, which at the same time, in the old Russian phrase of Kropotkin, was a movement toward the people, had become an agitation for this rate. It had been begun years before by Mayor Pingree in Detroit, and was taken up in Cleveland by Tom Johnson, whose whole career in a romantic manner, at once embodied and illustrated the history of the street railway problem in the American city. The adop