The element of selling is not of major importance in many services performed by the state which nevertheless require constant watching in order to prevent corrupt misuse. Efforts to use the mails improperly are continually being made by get-rich-quick schemes, swindlers, gamblers, and touts of all descriptions. Crop reports are furnished without charge, but extraordinary precautions are necessary to prevent them from leaking out. Instances such as the foregoing also serve to illustrate the point that any extension of the functions of government results in an enlargement of the opportunities for political corruption. Government railways, for example, would afford venal public officials many crooked opportunities (as _e.g._, for false billing, charges, and discrimination) which do not now exist as direct menaces to public administrative integrity. Private management of railways, however, has not been so free from such evils as to be able to use this argument effectively against nationalisation. Municipalities selling water, gas, or electricity, are notoriously victimised on a large scale by citizens whose self-interest as consumers overcomes all thought of civic duty or common honesty.[60] There is one other closely related phenomenon connected with the extension of the economic functions of government which will perhaps not so readily be thought of as corrupt, and which yet deserves consideration from that point of view. Public service enterprises under government ownership and management are always exposed to what some writers stigmatise as “democratic finance,”—that is strong popular pressure to reduce rates. Cost of production and the general financial condition of a given city may make the reduction of the prices charged for water, electricity, or gas, frankly contrary to public policy. Yet the self-interest of the consumer suggests the use of his vote and political influence to compel such reductions. Of course his action is not consciously corrupt, but it has every other characteristic feature of this evil. * * * * *