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
