“socialized,” and in modern life a large number of subsidiary works for the protection of the life and wealth of the community are added to these first public duties.  Roads, bridges, and a large part of the machinery of communication or conveyance are soon found to be capable of abuse if left to private ownership; hence the post and telegraph is generally State-owned, and in most countries the railways.  There is for the same reason a strong movement towards the municipal ownership of tramways, gas-and water-works, and all such works as are associated with monopoly of land, and are not open to adequate competition.  In England everywhere these works are subject to public control, and the tendency is for this control, which implies part ownership, to develop into full ownership.  Nearly half the gas-consumers in this country are already supplied by public works.  One hundred and two municipalities own electric plant, forty-five own their tramway systems, one hundred and ninety-three their water supplies, at the close of 1902.

The receipts of local authorities from rates and other sources, including productive undertakings, had increased from seventy millions sterling to one hundred and forty-five millions between 1890-1 and 1901-2.  Art galleries, free libraries, schools of technical education, are beginning to spring up on all sides.  Municipal lodging-houses are in working at London, Glasgow, and several other large towns.

In every one of these cases, two forces are at work together, the pressure of an urgent public need, and the perception that private enterprise cannot be trusted to satisfy their need on account of the danger of monopoly.  How far or how fast this State or municipal limitation of private enterprise and assumption of public enterprise will proceed, it is not possible to predict.  Everything depends on the two following considerations—­

First, the tendency of present private industries concerned with the supply of common wants of life to develop into dangerous monopolies by the decay of effective competition.  If the forces at work in the United States for the establishment of syndicates, trusts, and other forms of monopoly, show themselves equally strong in England, the inevitable result will be an acceleration of State and municipal socialism.

Secondly, the capacity shown by our municipal and other public bodies for the effective management of such commercial enterprises as they are at present engaged in.

Reviewing then the mass of restrictive, regulative, and prohibitive legislation, largely the growth of the last half century, and the application of the State and municipal machinery to various kinds of commercial undertakings in the interest of the community, we find it implies a considerable and growing restriction of the sphere of private enterprise.