Page:George Soule - The Intellectual and the Labor Movement.djvu/28



The Public Ownership League of America, 127 N. Dearborn St., Chicago, Ill., needs a thousand men and women for public service. The cities of America, the states and the nation need and cry out for men who will train and qualify themselves, discipline and equip themselves for specific tasks in the public service.

Everywhere our cities are struggling with their utility problems—their street car service, water works, gas plants, electric light and power plants. The Public Ownership League is organizing and marshalling the forces that help in these struggles. It supplies the facts and information which it has laboriously collected through years of patient research work; it furnishes speakers, writers or campaign managers; it supplies engineers to build the plant, or valuation experts to see that the city is not defrauded in a purchase price; and, where needed, it supplies attorneys to help the city fight its legal battles. In short the League endeavors to help a city or community at every step of the way in the specific task of securing the public ownership and efficient operation of the public utilities.

And scarcely a day passes that the League does not help some city somewhere in securing the public ownership of one or the other of its public utilities. Over 750 cities have installed municipal electric light and power plants since the League began its work and at least 50 of these have been directly assisted by the League while scores of others have been helped indirectly. And the field grows daily. What the League has been doing heretofore in helping the individual city here and there, it must now do on a much larger scale. For a new phase of the public utility problem has arisen—that of the private monopoly in the hydro-electric and superpower field. The private corporations are swiftly seizing upon every possible resource of water power and coal for the production of electric current, capturing and consolidating both private and municipal plants and tieing them into vast interconnected superpower systems. Thus they will shortly be in complete control of the hydro-electric and superpower field in America and controlling the power they will control every phase of modern civilization. For electricity is the power of the future. For the home, for industry, transportation, mining and for agriculture—electricity from now on is the one absolute essential. He who controls the power controls all.

Hence the commanding need for public ownership in this larger field. And the Public Ownership League is organizing forces, drafting and introducing bills, pressing publicity in a dozen states at once. But the need and the task grow daily. There is need for engineers, writers, organizers, speakers, utility specialists, research workers, attorneys.