The history of the gas monopoly is repeating itself in the matter of electric lighting. The smaller cities of the country, in their haste to "boom," are ready to grant a liberal franchise to the first firm or company which offers to supply an electric-lighting system, trusting to future competition to regulate prices, a resource that must prove of no avail. Nor are the men in power in our larger cities any wiser. The city of New York is taking every means to encourage the operation of rival electric-light companies, and is letting yearly contracts for street-lighting to the lowest bidder. It is true that competition is active just now, but it requires no far-seeing eye to discern the inevitable combination and consolidation among the companies.
Again, not only is competition of this sort sure to fail, but the attempt to establish it is very harmful. To say nothing of the expense and waste of wealth which is involved when rival companies are allowed to stretch their wires and establish their extensive central stations in the same district, it is everywhere acknowledged that the multiplication of wires overhead is a crying evil and danger. Are we to double and treble it, then, by permitting rival companies to place their wires wherever they please? It is evident that the temporary rivalry which we obtain in this way is bought at much too great a cost. What is true of electric street light wires is equally true of the vastly greater multitude of wires which belong to our rapidly growing system of domestic lighting, and the telegraph, telephone, and messenger service. Surely no man knoweth the beginning or the end of the network which is woven over our heads, and which, besides all the useful wires already enumerated, is full of "dead" wires, many of them strung by defunct or irresponsible companies, who would never have been allowed to obstruct the streets if they had not been "competing" for the business. Can there be any doubt that it is the height of folly to continue this work, and that the only rational way of entrusting electric service to incorporated companies is to permit but a single company to operate in a district and control prices by some other means than competition?