ity are
added to these first public duties. Roads, bridges, and a large part of
the machinery of communication or conveyance are soon found to be
capable of abuse if left to private ownership; hence the post and
telegraph is generally State-owned, and in most countries the railways.
There is for the same reason a strong movement towards the municipal
ownership of tramways, gas-and water-works, and all such works as are
associated with monopoly of land, and are not open to adequate
competition. In England everywhere these works are subject to public
control, and the tendency is for this control, which implies part
ownership, to develop into full ownership. Nearly half the gas-consumers
in this country are already supplied by public works. One hundred and
two municipalities own electric plant, forty-five own their tramway
systems, one hundred and ninety-three their water supplies, at the close
of 1902.

The receipts of local authorities from rates and other sources,
including productive undertakings, had increased from seventy millions
sterling to one hundred and forty-five millions between 1890-1 and
1901-2. Art galleries, free libraries, schools of technical education,
are beginning to spring up on all sides. Municipal lodging-houses are in
working at London, Glasgow, and several other large towns.

In every one of these cases, two forces are at work together, the
pressure of an urgent public need, and the perception that private
enterprise cannot be trusted to satisfy their need on account of the
danger of monopoly. How far or how fast this State or municipal
limitation of private enterprise and assumption of public enterprise
will proceed, it is not possible to predict. Everything depends on the
two following considerations--

First, the tendency of present private industries concerned with the
supply of common wants of life to develop into dangerous monopolies by
the decay of effective competition. If the forces at work in the United
States for the establishment of syndicates, trusts, and other forms of
monopoly, show themselves equally strong in England, the inevitable
result will be an acceleration of State and municipal socialism.

Secondly, the capacity shown by our municipal and other public bodies
for the effective management of such commercial enterprises as they are
at present engaged in.

Reviewing then the mass of restrictive, regulative, and prohibitive
legislation, largely the growth of the last hal