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.
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