posed that such utilities should be subject to municipal or state
regulation, that the formation of utility companies should be under
public control, and that the issue of stocks and bonds must be approved
by public authority. In some cases state, and in other cases municipal,
commissions were created to exercise this great power over "quasi-public
corporations." Wisconsin, by laws enacted in 1907, put all heat, light,
water works, telephone, and street railway companies under the
supervision of a single railway commission. Other states followed this
example rapidly. By 1920 the principle of public control over municipal
utilities was accepted in nearly every section of the union.

A second line of reform appeared in the "model franchise" for utility
corporations. An illustration of this tendency was afforded by the
Chicago street railway settlement of 1906. The total capital of the
company was fixed at a definite sum, its earnings were agreed upon, and
the city was given the right to buy and operate the system if it desired
to do so. In many states, about the same time, it was provided that no
franchises to utility companies could run more than twenty-five years.

A third group of reformers were satisfied with nothing short of
municipal ownership. They proposed to drive private companies entirely
out of the field and vest the ownership and management of municipal
plants in the city itself. This idea was extensively applied to electric
light and water works plants, but to street railways in only a few
cities, including San Francisco and Seattle. In New York the subways are
owned by the city but leased for operation.

=Tenement House Control.=--Among the other pressing problems of the
cities was the overcrowding in houses unfit for habitation. An inquiry
in New York City made under the authority of the state in 1902 revealed
poverty, misery, slums, dirt, and disease almost beyond imagination. The
immediate answer was the enactment of a tenement house law prescribing
in great detail the size of the rooms, the air space, the light and the
sanitary arrangement for all new buildings. An immense improvement
followed and the idea was quickly taken up in other states having large
industrial centers. In 1920 New York made a further invasion of the
rights of landlords by assuring to the public "reasonable rents" for
flats and apartments.

=Workmen's Compensation.=--No small part of the poverty in cities was
due to the injury o