People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 February 1895 — “Unemployed" a Necessity. [ARTICLE]

“Unemployed" a Necessity.

Banker Lyman J. Gage once said, while the Columbian expositor) was still in its incipiency: •Unemployed men are a necessity. We shall want 50,000 men to build the world’s fair. If they were all employed we would have to pay them more in order to draw them from their work.’ I consider that a queer assertion. So an army of unemployed is necessary for the convenience of the capitalists. After they are through with the poor wretches the police and soldiers can chase them out of the city, off the Lake Front park, and make life a burden for them until they are needed again. The remedy for this evil lies in com jelling the government, national, state, and city, to furnish emiloyment. There are hundreds of ways in which this city could furnish employment direct to men instead of handing it over to contractors. The city could put a force of men to work cleaning the city—it needs it badly: it could erect its own police stations and engine-houses, pave its streets, build its own tire apparatus, make the clothing worn by its tire and police departments, and in other ways supply work. The hours of labor should be reduced so that every man can work and live as a civilized human being should live. T. J. Morgan.

Municipal Ownership the Best. Municipal ownership of light ing plants is just now the subject of considerable controversy. The American Land and Title Register has prepared a list ol eighteen cities which are lighted by private concerns and offsets it with a list of twenty cities in which the lighting plants are owned by municipalities. In the first list the average cost pei light is $109.81, while in the latter the average cost is $55.50 per light. There is only one city in the list of those lighting by private plants in which the cost per light is below the high est which uses the public plant. But the peculiar thing about the table is that the cost by private plants varies from $170.50 to SBO for each light, while with those using municipal plants the cost varies from $82.40 to $38.50 per light. The inference is that the private plants charge too much by onehalf for the service rended the public. The chief argument against the municipal ownership of lighting plants, street car lines, water-works and the like, is that they simply become cogs on the wheels of the political machine and breed corruption in official circles. This argument, if it proves anything, proves too much, would apply with equal force to the letting of lighting contracts, as well as to municipal ownership. In this city both systems are in use and the charge of corruption is not urged against one system more than the other, and it is probable that no part of the city’s work is more free from the charge of venality than is that of lighting. # The table shows one fact that is beyond dispute—that the cost of lighting cities which use their own plant averages less than one-half the cost where the lighting is done by contract with the owners of private plants, and if there is in that any argument involving corruption it is against the privateplant system and in favor of the municipal plant. If there is no objection to the city furnishing its inhabitants with water there can be none to its supplying them with light, for the corruption argument is not more applicable to one than to the other, and experience shows that in both the benefits are in favor of the municipal systpm. — Chicago Daily Record,