In my first campaign we proposed to grant no renewal of franchises at a rate of fare higher than three cents. Jones had advised it, and I had been committed to it long before. It was Tom Johnson’s old slogan, and it was popular. I used to explain to the crowds my own conviction that the problem never would be settled until we had municipal ownership, but there was in Toledo in those days very little sentiment for municipal ownership, and my conviction met with no applause, and was received only with mild toleration. In the second campaign, there was more indorsement; in the third there was a certain enthusiasm for the principle, in the fourth it seemed to be almost unanimous, and now the principle has become one of the cardinal articles of faith. I do not wish it to appear that I had converted all these people to my view; I had not tried to do that, and doubtless could not have done so had I tried, but the conviction came by the very necessities of the situation. LIX Those men who ventured early into the street-car business were pioneers; they assumed large risks, and they rendered a public service. They had the courage to undertake experiments; they had faith that the town would grow and become in time a city. And they staked all on the chance. They had little difficulty, if they had any at all, in securing franchises from the city to use the streets, for the people of the city were glad to have the convenience of transportation. Indeed many of the lines were community enterprises, organized by the men of a given neighborhood for the sake of the transportation merely, and not with any notion of personal profit. Franchise ordinances then were loosely drawn; men had no conception of what changes the future was to bring about, they lacked the imagination to prefigure it, the faith to believe it, and so the street-car promoters who came along a little later were the heirs of advantages which otherwise they would not have obtained. Under these advantages, these privileges, they or their immediate grantees were enabled to take over for their own use and profit the enormous social values that were being created in cities, not by them, but by all those families who moved in, and toiled, and wrought and built the modern city.