“Besides our international relations, and the army, navy, police, and the courts of justice, the community now carries on for itself, in some part or another of these islands, the post-office, telegraphs, carriage of small commodities, coinage, surveys the regulation of the currency and note issue, the provision of weights and measures, the making, sweeping, lighting, and repairing of streets, roads, and bridges, life insurance, the grant of annuities, shipbuilding, stockbroking, banking, farming, and money-lending.  It provides for many of us from birth to burial—­midwifery, nursery, education, board and lodging, vaccination, medical attendance, medicine, public worship, amusements, and interment.  It furnishes and maintains its own museums, parks, art galleries, libraries, concert-halls, roads, bridges, markets, slaughterhouses, fire-engines, lighthouses, pilots, ferries, surf-boats, steam-tugs, life-boats, cemeteries, public baths, washhouses, pounds, harbours, piers, wharves, hospitals, dispensaries, gas-works, water-works, tramways, telegraph-cables, allotments, cow-meadows, artisans’ dwellings, schools, churches, and reading-rooms.  It carries on and publishes its own researches in geology, meteorology, statistics, zoology, geography, and even theology.  In our colonies the English Government further allows and encourages the communities to provide for themselves railways, canals, pawnbroking, theatres, forestry, cinchona farms, irrigation, leper villages, casinos, bathing establishments, and immigration, and to deal in ballast, guano, quinine, opium, salt, and what not.  Every one of these functions, with those of the army, navy, police, and courts of justice, were at one time left to private enterprise, and were a source of legitimate individual investment of capital."[37]

Some of the utilities and conveniences thus supplied by public capital and public labour are old-established wants, but many are new wants, and the marked tendency of public bodies to undertake the provision of the new necessaries and conveniences which grow up with civilization is a phenomenon which deserves close attention.

Sec. 5.  Motives of “Socialistic Legislation.”—­Stated in general terms, this socialistic tendency may be described as a movement for the control and administration by the public of all works engaged in satisfying common general needs of life, which are liable, if trusted to private enterprise, to become monopolies.

Articles which everybody needs, the consumption or use of which is fairly regular, and where there is danger of insufficient or injurious competition, if the provision be left to private firms, are constantly passing, and will pass more and more quickly, under public control.  The work of protection against direct injuries to person and property has in all civilized countries been recognized as a dangerous monoply if left to private enterprise.  Hence military, naval, police, and judicial work is first