axer, who was
elected mayor of the city in 1901, 1903, 1905 and 1907. The municipality
owns the water-works, a small electric-light plant, the garbage plant
and bath houses. The city water is pumped to reservoirs, through a
tunnel 9 ft. in diameter 60 ft. below the bottom of the lake, from an
intake situated a distance of 26,500 ft. from the shore. The system has
a delivery capacity of 80,000,000 gallons daily. The department serves
about 70,000 consumers. All water is metered and sells for 40 cents per
thousand cub. ft., or 5 barrels for 1 cent. The municipal
electric-lighting plant does not seriously compete with the private
lighting company. The municipal garbage plant (destructor) collects and
reduces to fertilizer 100 tons of garbage per day. The sale of the
fertilizer more than pays for the cost of reduction, and the only
expense the city has is in collecting it. In the city's six bath houses
the average number of baths per day, per house, in 1906, was 1165. The
municipal street cleaning department cleans all streets by the wet
process. To do this the city maintained (1906) 24 flushing wagons
working 2 shifts of 8 hours each per day. A new street car company began
operations on the 1st of November 1906, charging a 3 cent fare. The
grants of this company were owned by the Forest City Railway Company and
the property was leased to the Municipal Traction Company (on behalf of
the public--the city itself not being empowered to own and operate
street railways). In 1908 the Cleveland Electric Street Railway
Corporation (capital $23,000,000), which owned most of the electric
lines in the city, was forced to lease its property to the
municipality's holding company, receiving a "security franchise,"
providing that under certain circumstances (_e.g._ if the holding
company should default in its payment of interest) the property was to
revert to the corporation, which was then to charge not more than
twenty-five cents for six tickets. In October 1908, at a special
election, the security franchise was invalidated, and the entire railway
system was put in the hands of receivers. In 1909 Johnson was defeated.
In 1910 a 25-year franchise was granted to the Cleveland Railway
Company, under which a 3-cent fare is required if the company can earn
6% on that basis, and 4 cents (7 tickets for 25 cents) is the maximum
fare, with a cent transfer charge, returned when the transfer is used.

_Commerce._--To meet the demands of the rapidl