enhanced expenditure when growing exigencies have to be met at no distant day. The select committee to inquire into negotiations for purchase were assured that if the companies were bought out, their disposable property would amount to many hundred thousand pounds, all to the good in the unification balance of profit and loss in the first year or two. And by way of answer to the obvious consideration that steadily extending wants would soon require the repurchase of land at a higher price, and the replacement, at greater cost, of extra filtering beds, there was the cynical suggestion that when all competition was extinguished, and all sense of joint-stock prudence removed, and the whole community left to the experimental discretion of an official bureau, water rental might be raised, by levying the charge indiscriminately on those who consumed and those who did not consume the article in which Government was invited to do a retail trade.
It is sometimes said in an off-hand way, as an excuse for unification, that since the metropolitan area was distributed by Parliament among the water companies, competition has ceased; and that although a new association might to-morrow ask legislative leave to introduce in Marylebone or Chelsea a fresh source of supply, it would be refused, or the intruding would sooner or later amalgamate with the older company; and therefore, it is argued that to all intents and purposes competition is out of the question. But this is not wholly true; competition is good for a great deal more than at first sight appears. As between rival vendors offering to lay connecting pipes from rival mains in the same street, competition may not be probable and certainly cannot be profitable; but is there no competition working, without noise or haste or failure, between separate companies renting as tenants at will, contiguous water farms within the metropolitan ambit? Is there no worth in example; is there no force in comparison; is there no pressure upon evil or negligent doers accruing from the praise of them that do well? In a civilized community progressive improvements of the greatest and noblest kind are not carried by jostling, underselling, out-bragging, or counter-mining. All the finders and sellers of water did not at once, or by concert, begin, far less complete, their costly contrivances for storage and purification; still less did they simultaneously undertake to raise new capital for the purpose
