We came upon the scene just when the discussion was emerging from the second into the third of those phases into which I have divided the development of the problem. The franchises granted almost a generation before were about to expire, and new arrangements between the city and the traction company, the Big Con, as the newspaper argot would have it. Chicago had already, or almost, gone through her settlement; and though the settlement was pretty bad, it nevertheless recognized the principle that the value of a street railway franchise is a public, social, or communal value, produced by the community, and therefore belonged to the community. In Toledo the company had but about $5,000,000 of actual investment, while it had a capitalization in stocks and bonds of nearly $30,000,000, and the difference of $25,000,000 was the community value which the magnates had been exploiting for their own benefit. We simply proposed that this value should be returned to the people. We proposed, then, that the rate of fare to be charged by the company should be large enough and only large enough to pay a reasonable return on the actual investment and to provide good service, a service that was to be dictated, regulated and controlled by the city. This principle had been established, or at least admitted in the Chicago settlement, and the same thing had been done, though on a sounder and more scientific basis in Cleveland, where Tom Johnson’s long and gallant and intelligent contest already in effect had been won. Over in Detroit the same principles had been deduced, though the discussion there was so prolonged, as proved ultimately to be the case in Toledo, that the people demanded municipal ownership, without passing through the intervening experimental stage of regulation and control.