872 REPORT—1896. 
countries organised as a national institution, and the complaints that are some- 
times heard as to ¢efects in its administration never extend to a demand for its 
abolition. Jevons, in a careful paper, showed that the same financial success 
which marks our present postal system, must not be expected from the nationalisa- 
tion of the telegraph service, and he dismissed even suggestions for the nationalisa- 
tion of railways. His predictions have been amply verified with respect to the 
telegraph account; but telegraphs are a national service amongst ourselves, and 
railways are largely nationalised in ‘many continental countries, and in some of our 
own colonies and dependencies. Some of our largest municipalities have under- 
taken the supply of water and of gas, or even of electric light, to the inhabitants, 
and a movement has begun, which seems likely to be extended, of undertaking the 
service of tramways. Demands have also been made for the municipalisation or 
nationalisation of the telephone service. 
It may be said of all the industries thus described as taken over, or likely to be 
taken over, by the nation and local communities, that when they are not so taken 
over they require for their exercise special powers and privileges conceded by the 
State or community, and the conditions of such concessions are settled by agree- 
ment between the community and the body or bodies exercising such industries. 
These conditions may involve the payment of a fixed sum, or of a rent for the 
concession, or the terms upon which the services are to be rendered may be 
prescribed in a stipulated tariff of charges, or the amount of profit to be realised 
by the concessionaires may be limited with provisions for reduction of charge 
when such limit is reached, or it may be required that in working such industries 
certain limits of wages shall be observed as the minima to be paid to the work- 
men employed upon them. Speaking very broadly, it may be said that the 
community delegates or leases the right of practising the industry, and there is no 
impassable gulf between prescribing the terms on which a lease shall be worked 
and assuming the conduct of the industry leased. There may be difficulties in 
the management by a community of a cumbrous and unwieldy undertaking, but 
there is no difficulty affecting the organisation of society when the undertaking 
must be created and shaped by the community in the first place. The arguments 
against the assumption of such monopolies by State or Local Authorities are those 
of expediency, founded on a comparison cf gain and loss. It may be urged that 
there are more forcible motives of economy on the part of a concessionaire than on 
the part of a community working the undertaking itself; that improvements of 
method and reductions of cost will be more carefully sought; and although such 
improvements and reductions might in theory be realised by the workmen and 
agents of a community, which would thus secure all the savings effected by them, 
yet private interest is quicker in discovery and more fertile in suggestion, and 
it is more profitable in the end for the community to allow a concessionnaire to 
secure such profits, subject to a stipulation that some part of them should return to 
the community in the way either of increased money payment, or of reduced rates 
of charge fur the services performed. It may be urged that when a community 
works an industry itself, it may do so at a loss, thus benefiting those who specially 
require its services at the cost of the whole body; but this objection is not peculiar 
to undertakings so directly worked. It is a matter of common experience for State. 
or Municipality to grant important subventions to persons willing to undertake 
such works on stipulated terms of service, and such subventions involve a levy 
from the whole community for the benefit of those availing themselves of the 
services. 
New considerations of great difficulty arise when we pass to the suggestion of 
the undertaking by local authorities of productive industries not in the nature of 
monopolies. In monopolies direct competition, often competition in any shape, 
is practically impossible; in other industries competition is a general rule; and it is 
by virtue of such competition that the members of the community do in the long 
run obtain their wants supplied in the most economical manner. When com- 
modities are easily carried without serious deterioration, the constantly changing 
conditions of production and of transport induce a constant variation in the sources. 
of cheapest supply—that is of supply under conditions of least toil and effort--- 
