Excerpt from Government Ownership of Public Utilities in the United States
The purpose in writing the present book has been to analyze the factors involved in the question of Government ownership of public utilities. The writer tried to convey his conviction that the question of Government ownership of public utilities and especially railroads in the United States is essentially one not of railroad management and operation itself, but of general economics and politics. To his mind, Government ownership of public utilities means absolute Government control not only of the industries but also of the politics in the various States and in the Union generally.
It means practically, if not formally, abolition of our democratic institutions and of the very spirit of democracy, and substitutes for the rule of the people, for the people, and by the people, an autocracy of the central government.
It means abolition of the present division of the country into forty-eight sovereign and independent States, and reduction of the States to simple electral districts, as well as loss by the States of their rights to tax railroad properties within their boundaries as an exercise of their right of sovereignty.
It means also forcing into politics our great corporations, and introducing a spirit of corruption and political subserviency at a time when the spirit of militant democracy is awakened in the land by the events of the past four years.
It means also giving one of the most potent arguments into the hands of the extreme socialist groups and thus reinforcing the sinister cohorts of enemy and Bolshevist propaganda.
The writer desires to make it perfectly clear that at no time does he wish to imply that advocates of Government ownership are harboring such intentions as abolishing the democratic institutions of this country or assisting the enemy in his vicious endeavor to disorganize and destroy our nation. In a matter of national life, however, it is not the intentions that count but the facts, and it is with facts and not intentions that the author of the present book has tried to deal.
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