154 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



view has of late years been changing. People are seeing that they have 

 an interest in public service corporations different from that concerned 

 merely with securing good gas, steady current, accommodating trolley 

 service, or pure water. The new laws providing for physical valuation as 

 a basis for determining rates for the use of public utility products or 

 services are an evidence of this change of attitude. 



That the public, the user, has been slow to recognize his real interest 

 in public service corporations does not in the least lessen the rightfulness 

 of that interest, or its substantial basis in fact. A savage has little or no 

 ethical life ; for although an ethical principle may be absolute per se, the 

 strength of that principle applied depends on contributory circumstances 

 of a nature to compel its recognition. Circumstances of corporation 

 growth, the misuse of the power flowing from privileges granted to indi- 

 viduals by public official bodies, have at last forced the user of the public 

 utilities to recognize his ethical right to consideration. 



The interest of the user in the public service company is, of course, 

 first of all, material. The company furnishes some service necessary to 

 health or to the reasonable comforts of modern life, or something neces- 

 sary to business. These services can not generally be secured except from 

 the public service corporation. For this reason the corporation is looked 

 upon rightly enough as a quasi-public organization. It is no longer a 

 private affair. It is not like the corner grocer or apothecary, who has a 

 competitor on the next corner to whom the customers can go. It is not 

 like the butcher, who has his stall in the public market in a row of twenty 

 similar stalls, and who competes for trade among the passing throng. 

 The public service corporation has, in great degree, the character of a 

 monopoly. The quasi-public element in the public service corporation is 

 recognized originally and conclusively by the grant of any franchise 

 carrying special privileges or providing for exclusion of other similar 

 corporations. 



In addition to this material interest, arising in the need of the com- 

 munity for fresh and pure water, light, heat and transportation, there is 

 the other, deeper consideration spoken of above. This flows from the 

 material interest, and is best described as an ethical interest. It is not 

 merely by equity or expediency that the user has rights in public service 

 utilities. It is because he puts something into the business. What he 

 puts in is fixed capital ; he can not withdraw it, and heretofore has had 

 little or nothing to say regarding the management of his share of the 

 investment. Much of this fixed capital, owned by the user of the public ' 

 service utilities, is in the form of franchise privileges granted by the 

 user, through his representatives in the local legislative body, for a 

 period of years or in perpetuity. It is just as surely a vested interest as 

 the money of the bond holder which has laid rails or strung wires, dug 

 ditches or erected pumping stations and gasometers. The fact that the 



