importance) being the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. It requires no great stretch of imagination to picture the same development with the railways of the United Kingdom.
A perhaps less meritorious motive that causes many Govern- ments to nationalize a service or industry is that of acquiring revenue thereby. When this occurs, the State undertaking is invariably made a monopoly, and is as much a means of indirect taxation as it is a business undertaking. Nationalized services of this description have hitherto been much rarer in the United Kingdom, as compared with other countries, although they are common enough in India and the British Crown Colonies. In India the working and sale of salt, in the Straits Settlements the sale of tin, and in many countries the manufacture and sale of tobacco in every shape and form are State monopolies, from which large profits are made or derived.
Services having to do primarily with the health and wellbeing of the whole community show a decided tendency towards public ownership. The sewerage systems of most countries are in the hands of public authorities, and in several departments of activ- ity relating to the health and wellbeing of the community, one can see in operation throughout the world the transition stage from private to public ownership, both systems working side by side, but with an invariable tendency on the part of the publicly owned service to grow, not merely by the establishment of ad- ditional institutions, but by the absorption of privately owned undertakings. This process is steadily in operation in England in connexion with such services as asylums, hospitals, cemeteries and water-works, whilst education is rapidly being transformed from a private into a publicly owned industry. The growth of these public services is not confined in England to the provision of services imposed upon municipal authorities by law; for example, municipally owned lunatic asylums now make provision for private paying patients, and are made use of to an increasing extent, so that the private asylum is gradually dying out.
Another class of undertaking which is becoming more and more publicly owned is the service which is essential to the whole community or at least to most sections thereof. First and foremost comes the transmission of correspondence through the post-office, the most familiar form of nationalized under- taking. When one bears in mind the fact that the nationalized British post-office is the largest multiple shop concern in that country, having a branch in every village, it can readily be seen that such a network of Government shops lends itself most easily to an extension of duties. How convenient such a network of Government shops may be to meet a sudden emergency is shown by the duties placed upon the post-office at short or no notice during the war. When it was decided to collect from the nation magazines and books for distribution to the troops at the various fronts, it sufficed merely to notify the public that it could hand such publications over the counter at any post-office. In their capacity of Government shops, the post-offices of the United Kingdom, within 1908-21, had taken on additional work involved by the following new services:
Payment of Old Age Pensions.
Payment of Army and Navy Allowances.
Sale and Encashment of Saving Certificates.
Sale of Government Loan Bonds.
Sale of National Health and Unemployment Stamps.
Sale of Entertainment Stamps.
Sale of Income Tax Stamps.
Nor are these new services all side-lines of small account; in hundreds of offices the actual sale of health and unemploy- ment insurance stamps exceed the sale of postage stamps. With the increased tendency towards social legislation, there is little doubt that the services performed by means of the comprehen- sive post-office organization in every country will inevitably be extended still further. In the United Kingdom the Union of Post Office Workers had for some time before 1921 been carrying on an agitation for the provision of new facilities for the public which are in operation in other countries, such as the introduc- tion of the postal cheque and transfer system, dispatch of parcels on the cash-on-delivery system, the collection of bills and sub- scriptions, etc. This agitation is worth noting by students of
Nationah'zation, as indicative of fields of activity for trade unions composed of workers in a nationalized undertaking, additional to those concerned merely with their own betterment.
There are, however, other services which, being essential to all or most sections of the community, are gradually coming to be recognized as due to be transferred from the realm of private profit-making to that of public service. In most countries rail- way and canal transport are regarded as naturally falling within this category, and not a year passes without numerous water, gas and electricity undertakings in all parts of the world being trans- ferred from companies to municipal bodies.
In the working out of the problem that has for some time been engaging the attention of engineers, of the most economical large-scale production and distribution of energy or power, the trend has been inevitably towards public ownership. The largest generator and distributor of hydro-electric power in the world was, in 1921, the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, a publicly owned body formed on a cooperative basis by city and rural municipalities, through which the province of Ontario generated through hydro-electric energy over 95% of the total consumption of power within its borders from all sources. The Australian Government Morwell Power scheme will supply electricity to the greater part of Victoria, and in Sweden and Switzerland the respective Governments are developing elec- tricity from water-power on a very large scale. In fact, through- out the world, almost all the great developments in this direction were in 1921 being carried out by, or on behalf of, Governments or municipal authorities, or combinations of both.
At first sight it might appear possible to draw a line of demar- cation between these services which naturally fall within the sphere of public ownership and those which belong to the realm of private enterprise; but this is not so simple as it looks. It is easy to say that the community should carry on non-profit- making undertakings like the roads, sewers and public conven- iences, leaving all other services, out of which profits can be made, to private enterprise, which, with the aforesaid profit-making incentive, is likely to give more facilities and be more receptive to new ideas. But it is only custom which makes us regard the provision of a drainage system, the collection of refuse, etc., as a non-profit-making service. In Rosario, the second most populous city in the Argentine Republic, and in Valparaiso, the second largest city of Chile, the drains belong to, and are operated by, the Rosario Drainage Company, and the Valparaiso (Chile) Drainage Company, respectively, both English com- panies. In Paris and Brussels limited companies make the busi- ness of supplying public conveniences pay handsomely.
Another argument might be that, as water, gas, electricity and tramway services cannot be carried on without disturbance to the publicly owned roads and bridges, it is natural that these undertakings should be owned by the same authority as is respon- sible for the roads. This might explain the fact that, gradually, such undertakings are becoming nationalized or municipal- ized, but one is constrained to ask why the roads and bridges themselves should be publicly owned; they were not always so, and practically every municipality now makes a monetary loss on bridges which at one time, under private enterprise, produced good profits to their owners.
Many people would agree that services directly connected with the health of the community should be carried on as public undertakings without regard to profit, e.g. isolation and general hospitals, ambulance services, sewers, extinction of fires and saving of lives in connection therewith. But here again it is difficult to draw a definite line of demarcation. If sewers are vital to the health of a city, so also is a supply of pure milk; and the extension of public ownership along this direction is shown by the fact that the town of Sheffield, since November 1918, has municipalized its milk supply, and its example was in 1921 likely to be followed by other British cities.
State Leases. There is an intermediate form of Nationalization or public ownership which to a considerable extent bridges the gulf between those who consider that all services and industries vital to the community should be carried on by the community.
