sary, but the pressure of population will eventually compel a
common rule to which the individual must submit. As surely as a growing
town sooner or later requires a common water-supply, a common drainage,
common sanitary provisions, and regulated hack charges, just so surely
will the private monopoly somewhere and at some time require strict
social control,--that is, control from the point of view of all of us
and not from that of a few money-makers. A generation ago the stripping
of our forests did not matter vitally. The interests that were to suffer
from this stripping had not appeared. To-day a forestry policy derived
absolutely from the common, social point of view has become a necessity
so commanding that the nation's attention is at last caught. A
generation ago no one had even guessed at the franchise-value of our
streets,--not even those of New York city. After Jacob Sharp had made
these values known, a struggle began which reads like an Arabian tale.
It is a story of business and political corruption that has gone on in
varying degrees in scores of our cities and in scores of great
industries where strong men have been fighting to get control of mines,
forests, lands, and oil, the development of which depended on favorable
transportation. The carrying trade--whether of goods or people--is never
to be omitted in this story. Until very recent years, this mother of
monopolies, the railroad, was thought of as a purely private possession.
A dozen years ago one of our ablest railroad lawyers (often before the
United States Supreme Court with great cases) told me it had long been
one of his intellectual amusements to try to force into the heads of
railroad presidents the fact that their ownership of that kind of
property was profoundly different from the ownership of a horse or a
grocery store. "I finally," he said, "had to give it up." It meant
nothing to them that society had given them stupendous privileges which
qualified their ownership. These franchise-grants once in their pockets,
everything that was built upon them came to be used in any conceivable
game to enrich the owner.

Properly informed persons no longer discuss whether it is right and
moral to allow railroad magnates to do as they like--to act as if these
properties were strictly a private possession. We know, at last, how
society has suffered from leaving this form of ownership so long without
social control. We have seen the devastating conflict bet