| OCR Text |
Show "THE PUBLIC AND PUBLIC UTILITIES." 1 j Another editorial worth rending.; J Tills is from the Boston News Bu-! Bu-! rcau and was reprinted in the Wall 1 Street Journal : 'The prosperity of every community com-munity and of the United States as a whole depends very largely on prosperity of our public utilities. They will not prosper unless a spirit of mutual goodwill and tolerance toler-ance is developed between them, for if the public is dependent upon the utility for service, the utility is dependent de-pendent upon the public for capital. capi-tal. And one thing the public must learn is that a monopoly is not necessarily a predatory monster or a sinister menace to the general welfare. "Men who invest in ordinary business are quite at liberty to sell their goods when, where, and for what they please. They may shut up shop when they choose. But when men go into such public utility enterprises as telephone, electric light, heat and power, gas, water works, transportation, they do not possess the liberties as to when, where and what that the ordinary business man has. The public utilities come under public regulation; and the general public ought to see that it is to the interest in-terest of the general w-elfare that regulatory bodies should not merely mere-ly look after such matters as limitation of earnings but should also guarantee such a fair return that investors will promptly supply sup-ply the capital that shall enable the utility to continue rendering its service. "Few subjects are more befogged be-fogged than this, and few ought to be more clearly understood. For the whole public lias a stake both in the service a utility furnishes and in the capital it uses. More than 1.500,000 citizens have put their savings into electric light and power companies. The great insurance in-surance companies have invested many millions in the same securities. securi-ties. And the 29,000 banks of the country have placed $1,700,000,000, belonging to 27,000,000 depositors in these same investments. Few citizens citi-zens are not directly or indirectly stockholders nt least in one utility. As the engineer of the corporation commission of Oklahoma said in a recent address, the best thing that can happen to a utility is to secure a large percentage of its customers as owners of its stock. "Utilities, as a rule, must have huge amounts of capital as compared com-pared with private business in like localities. The merchant turns over his investment several times a year and each turnover yields a profit. The utility must make a far larger investment and turns over its capital capi-tal only once in several years. A merchant may do a business of .$200,000 a year on an investment of $50,000 ; to obtain a $200,000 annual an-nual business the utility must have an investment five times as great. "Frank and full publicity and a spirit of service on the one side and fair-minded tolerance on the other will bring the public and the public utility together to mutual advantage." |
