SOME ECONOMIC ASPECTS OF ELECTRIC 

 POWER DISTRIBUTION. 



BY LOUIS BELL. 



[Louis Bell, consulting electric engineer; born Chester, N. H., Dec. 5, 1864; resides 

 in Boston, where, besides his active life in his profession, he has found time to write 

 many scientific and technical essays chiefly for the Engineering Magazine, in which 

 the article here published first appeared ; also author of the following books among 

 others: The Electric Railway, Electrical Power Distribution, Power Distribution 

 for Electrical Railways, The Art of Illumination.] 



Much of the complicated mechanism which we are pleased 

 to call modern civilization has for its purpose the survival 

 of the unfittest and the subversion of natural laws. Instead 

 of punishing criminals, we spin fine drawn theories about 

 them and turn them loose to be a drag upon the progress of 

 decent society. Instead of segregating degenerates in suita- 

 ble asylums, we form societies for the study of their literary 

 and artistic works and pay two dollars per seat to hear their 

 mephitic plays. We treat economic laws with even more 

 contempt than civil and criminal laws. Professors of the 

 dismal science sometimes speak of the law of supply and 

 demand as bearing at least some remote relation to actual 

 human needs, while in reality the basis of many movements 

 in modern industry is the substitution of an artificial law 

 for the natural one. If vested interests have acquired an 

 unprofitable railroad, which upon a sound commercial basis 

 should not have been built prior to 1950, there is at once a 

 cry for such a "readjustment" of rates as shall charge up the 

 loss to communities along lines which were more wisely 

 planned. Fortunately, civilization brings good along with 

 evil; and while there is terrible loss of energy in the artificial 

 methods employed, there is still progress, not so much per- 

 haps as the world flatters itself in thinking, but progress 

 nevertheless. 



In the last resort, the substance of civilization is human 

 development — all the rest is accident. The Greeks had no 

 knowledge of steamships railroads, electric lights, telegraphs, 



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