POWER. 123 



utilities commission -would in all likelihood force a corresponding 

 reduction in price, and all the effort would come to nothing really 

 worth while, since these projects are in the nature of public-service 

 corporations.^ The public at large can be relied upon to pay any 

 price conventionally established just so long as the actual cost of 

 production is sufficiently high to prevent the rate from being too 

 extortionate; hence, no one gains by lowering the cost of produc- 

 tion — except the public, which goes, therefore, to no account. A 

 special price may even be quoted to industrial users to discourage 

 the larger interests from generating their oAvn electric power, since 

 they have a choice in this matter which the public does not enjoy. 

 Thus the river that flows through the town has the beauty of its 

 course unsullied by commercialism. Instead, a trolley park, with 

 merry-go-rounds, dancing pavilions, loop-the-loops, and the like, 

 occup}^ the power site. With its art and enterprise thus catered to, 

 American municipal life in plentiful instances, not excepting that of 

 the Caj^ital c\ty itself, is disposed to rest content. 



Thus industrially and civically alike the electric-power situation 

 is stagnant, caught in a backwater of convenience, with the course 

 of progress blocked by the obstacles of initial cost. But it is not 

 h^^droelectricity alone which has its progress thus obstructed. Its 

 case is conspicuous because the resource itself is largely cut off from 

 employment and advertises the inadequacies of the situation broad- 

 cast over the landscape. The shortcomings with reference to carbo- 

 electricity are not so obtrusive and hence not so notorious; they are 

 not heralded openly by actual disuse, but are cloaked instead under 

 conventional misapplication. Thus commonly as much as a fourth 

 of the coal-fired power employed in centers of population has its 

 energy applied in the form of electricity. Yet, with the rarest ex- 

 ceptions,^ this energy is transported to the centers of use in the form 

 of coal and there the electricity is generated in steam-power plants. 

 Electric-power usage has merely been appended to the established 

 structure of steam-power practice, with the result that the employ- 

 ment of power has been greatly facilitated, to the further aggrava- 

 tion of the broad problem of transportation. Thus far the very force 

 that has the capacity to correct the transportation evil has merely 

 served to accentuate it. By virtue of electricity, more power is con- 



lA designation not altogether clearly understood. It is sometimes construed as implying 

 corporations serving the public instead of being served by the public. The former meaning 

 is not justified by practice. 



^ The most significant exception is a power plant near Lansford, Pennsylvania, which 

 was placed at the coal source for the express purpose of serving a distant patronage, 

 its ultimate goal. Indeed, being Philadelphia and New Yorlt, Of course, first and last, 

 there are numerous stoam-electric plants in the coal regions, but with very few exceptions 

 they are present because of a local demand for electricity, not by virtue of the presence 

 of coal ; in the aggregate, therefore, they scarcely temper the transportation burden in 

 the coal country itself and have no effect at ail upon It outside. 



