But whether or not too great stress was three-cent fares we learned during those months of wearisome and futile negotiations, that the theory was not scientific. The people were entitled to their money’s worth in service, the company to adequate pay for the service it rendered, and as the basis of the whole transaction was a public necessity, the city had the right to control the service, to dictate what it should be. The old theory was that the people existed for the street-car company; the new principle was quite the reverse; the street-car company was but a temporary instrument of social service, and the social right was paramount to all others. The company therefore was entitled to a fare sufficient to enable it to provide the service thus demanded, and to do this it must charge enough to pay its operating expenses, taxes, and interest, enough to meet the cost of improvements and depreciation, and to pay a reasonable return on its investment. It was not entitled to any speculative return. There was no longer on the company’s part that risk its predecessors in interest, the pioneers or promoters or whatever they were, had been compelled to take; its investment was no longer precarious; nothing, indeed, could be more certain than the stability of street railway investments. Their securities, based upon a public necessity, supported by the diurnal comings and goings of all those thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, had become in a certain very real sense, a fixed burden upon the people of the city, a burden as fixed and inevitable as taxes. In the hands of private owners such securities, under a franchise ordinance properly drawn, partake largely of the character of municipal bonds, which indeed they resemble in fundamentals and ends. The issue of securities was therefore to be as jealously guarded as an issue of municipal bonds, and overcapitalization, the prolific source of so much evil, was to be prevented. The enterprise had become as stable as any human institution can be, and with the limited risk there was to be applied the familiar principle of limited profit. The principle was recognized in Cleveland, where the return fixed as reasonable was 6 per cent., which is but little more than municipal bonds pay. And when this principle is established, municipal ownership almost automatically follows; investors used to large speculative profits, are ready to sell out to the municipality; thus, by indirection, democracy comes into her own. It was easy enough to fix most of the elements of this return; the accountants could do that, in their intricate discussions of car-miles and curves and straight lines of depreciation and points of saturation in traffic, and all that, but the tremendous difficulty was to determine just what the investment was and what was a reasonable return on that investment.