TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 827 
There has been a readier response to public demands, a reduction of fares, and 
better treatment of employés—all of which have combined to make Municipal 
tramways very successful from a business point of view. 
Municipal trading compares well with private enterprise. But itis not enough 
to show profits from Municipal trading, as it is suggested that Municipalities have 
no business to make profits. These are chiefly the people who would like the 
profits for themselves. But there are other reasons, based on economical grounds, 
why the aim of Municipalities should be to provide the cheapest services at cost 
price rather than seek profit. The system of relieving general local taxation out 
of the surplus revenues of gas, water, and tramway and other undertakings has 
been necessary in order to demonstrate the business capacity of Municipal bodies ; 
but the policy is not one which best serves a community. When a town draws 
profit from gas, water, or electricity supplies, it is simply levying so much direct 
taxation on the users of these commodities for the benefit of the general community. 
The consumers might justly say that since the Municipality became the sole 
providers of gas and electricity, it deprived them of the advantages of competition, 
and should supply the cheapest possible article. 
Whether municipalities should make a profit is left largely to their own 
discretion. It is becoming the practice not to make trading profits from water 
supply, and only a small margin of profit is sought on artisans’ and labourers’ 
dwellings and lodging houses. The practice of Parliament tends towards restrict- 
ing profits. Profit from electricity supply works, for instance, is limited to 
5 per cent. All surplus above that should be devoted to reducing charges. In 
Scotland, profit-making in connection with water or gas supplies is rendered 
impossible by the General Acts, which provide that surpluses go to reduce charges. 
No town has advanced so far in Municipal organisation as Glasgow, and no town 
stands higher for the efficiency of its administration or the civic spirit of its 
citizens ; and nowhere else, taken all round, are charges for Municipal services so 
low; nor has any other town carried out so systematically the policy of little 
rofit. 
j It will be found that in the towns where the civic spirit isthe keenest and 
healthiest, where Municipal institutions are most largely developed, there the 
profit sought is least and the administration is the best. 
3. The Single Tax. By WiviiaAM Smart, I.A., LL.D., Adam Smith Pro- 
fessor of Political Economy in the University of Glasgow.! 
In the universal division and co-operation of industry by which the national 
dividend is produced and distributed, as ‘ at once the net product of and the sole 
source of payment for all the instruments of production within the country,’ the 
economic position of the Government is this. The Government services, imperial 
and local, are a part of this dividend, purveyed by a certain class of the citizens 
just as ordinary guods and services are purveyed by other classes; they are paid 
for partly by fees, but principally by taxation. This is disguised by the definition 
of a tax as a ‘compulsory contribution ;’ but, on analysis, the compulsory contri- 
bution is seen to be nothing else than a payment for definite services rendered to 
the citizens generally, the price paid by the individual citizen being, not a com- 
petitive price, but an equality of sacrifice price. 
The Single Tax, on the other hand, is an outcome of Henry George's theory 
that the cause of poverty in progressive societies is private property in land. Of 
the two alternatives, to formally confiscate the land without any compensation or 
to confiscate its rent, he chose the latter. This would, of course, give the Govern- 
ment an immense revenue, and taxation would be unnecessary. 
Evidently this is not a rival system of taxation to ours, as the Impét Unique 
might have been, but an alternative plan of confiscation. Instead of the old 
constitutional connection, by which every citizen has a stake and a voice in the 
} The paper was published in egtenso in the Glasgow Herald, September 16. 
