Those men who ventured early into the street car business were pioneers; they assumed large risks, and they rendered a public service. They had the courage to undertake experiments; they had faith that the town would grow and become in time a city. And they staked all on the chance. They had little difficulty, if they had any at all, in securing franchises from the city to use the streets, for the people of the city were glad to have the convenience of transportation. Indeed many of the lines were community enterprises, organized by the men of a given neighborhood for the sake of the transportation merely, and not with any notion of personal profit.
Franchise ordinances then were loosely drawn; men had no conception of what changes the future was to bring about, they lacked the imagination to prefigure it, the faith to believe it, and so the street car promoters who came along a little later were the heirs of advantages which otherwise they would not have obtained. Under these advantages, these privileges, they or their immediate grantees were enabled to take over for their own use and profit the enormous social values that were being created in cities, not by them, but by all those families who moved in, and toiled, and wrought and built the modern city.
This was the first phase of the street car business, its experimental stage, commensurate with the rapid, disordered growth of the city in the middle
