power: its significance and needs. 
27 
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 . 1 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 own 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, 
occupy the power site. With its art and enterprise thus catered to, 
American municipal life in plentiful instances, not excepting that of 
the Capital city 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 
hydroelectricity 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 , 2 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- 
X A 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. 
2 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 York. Of course, first and last, 
there are numerous steam-electric plants in the coal regions, hut 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 all upon it outside. 
