Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/158

154 view has of late years been changing. People are seeing that they have an interest in public service corporations different from that concerned merely with securing good gas, steady current, accommodating trolley service, or pure water. The new laws providing for physical valuation as a basis for determining rates for the use of public utility products or services are an evidence of this change of attitude.

That the public, the user, has been slow to recognize his real interest in public service corporations does not in the least lessen the rightfulness of that interest, or its substantial basis in fact. A savage has little or no ethical life; for although an ethical principle may be absolute per se, the strength of that principle applied depends on contributory circumstances of a nature to compel its recognition. Circumstances of corporation growth, the misuse of the power flowing from privileges granted to individuals by public official bodies, have at last forced the user of the public utilities to recognize his ethical right to consideration.

The interest of the user in the public service company is, of course, first of all, material. The company furnishes some service necessary to health or to the reasonable comforts of modern life, or something necessary to business. These services can not generally be secured except from the public service corporation. For this reason the corporation is looked upon rightly enough as a quasi-public organization. It is no longer a private affair. It is not like the corner grocer or apothecary, who has a competitor on the next corner to whom the customers can go. It is not like the butcher, who has his stall in the public market in a row of twenty similar stalls, and who competes for trade among the passing throng. The public service corporation has, in great degree, the character of a monopoly. The quasi-public element in the public service corporation is recognized originally and conclusively by the grant of any franchise carrying special privileges or providing for exclusion of other similar corporations.

In addition to this material interest, arising in the need of the community for fresh and pure water, light, heat and transportation, there is the other, deeper consideration spoken of above. This flows from the material interest, and is best described as an ethical interest. It is not merely by equity or expediency that the user has rights in public service utilities. It is because he puts something into the business. What he puts in is fixed capital; he can not withdraw it, and heretofore has had little or nothing to say regarding the management of his share of the investment. Much of this fixed capital, owned by the user of the public service utilities, is in the form of franchise privileges granted by the user, through his representatives in the local legislative body, for a period of years or in perpetuity. It is just as surely a vested interest as the money of the bond holder which has laid rails or strung wires, dug ditches or erected pumping stations and gasometers. The fact that the