Industrial freedom. [volume] (Edison, Wash.) 1898-1???, 1898-09-03

wash-houses, lodging-hOuses, model
homes for widowers, model homes for
widows. Tumble-down rookeries and
filthy and disease haunts for
vice and crime were purchased by the
municipality, torn down, and in their
places beautiful buildings were erected
to minister to the social needs of the
people in the many ways indicated, the
great municipality of Glasgow bringing
| light, air and sunshine to the downcast
men and women who before, on account
of their poverty, were compelled to
live in the foul tenements that dis
graced the city. Public washhouses
for the poor are a benefaction. The
poor woman, living with her children
in a rented room, perhaps with no con-
venveniences for washing or drying her
clothes, goes to a public washhouse,
and for a penny is furnished with tub,
| mangle, wringer, steam dryer. and in
an hours time is back home with her
washing nicely done and for less ex-
pense than the cost of fuel that would
have been necessary in her own crowd
ed quarters. Workingmen, unable to
find respectable quarters for lodging.
can now 90 to lodging house provided
by their mother, the municipality, a
beautiful stone building four stories
high, where they have bath, laundry,
lavatories, library and game rooms, and
all this at the minimum cost, with no
thought of making profit to enrich
some individual, but with the thought
uppermost in the mind of the munich
pality of making profit to enrich all and
thus enrich the municipality.
PUBLIC OWNERSHIP Is PRACTICAL
CHRISTIANITY.
The movement for public ownership
is government seeking the good of all
as against the individual who seeks on
ly his own good. 1t is recognition of
the fundamental fact that the humblest
citizen is entitled to the greatest de-
gree of comfort that associated effort
can provide. tits organized love, mani
Testing itself in service. 1t is patriot
ism of the highest and purest type. 1t
is the casting down of idols and the lift
ing up of ideals. 1t is dethroning the
millionaires and exalting the millions.
Happily, We are passing away from the
abject worship of mere dollars to a
realization of the truth SO tersely stated
by the simple Nazarene nearly 1900
years ago: "Ye cannot worship God
and Mammon." And We are coming to
measure men, not by their ability to or
ganize industry and use their fellow
men simply as profit making machines,
but by their ability TO organize indus
try and serve their fellow men, and
where can we look for nobler examples
OF patriotism, or love of country, than
to the men and women whose lives have
been devoted to the service of their fell
low men rather than to mere sordid
worship of wealth, rather than to de-
bauching the machinery of justice and
the peoples Legislators in order to
serve their own purposes. "Bribed by
the rich to rob the poor" was the
scathing verdict pronounced by the
Hon. Wayne McVeagh upon the legis-
lators of Philadelphia who leased the
gas works created by the vote of the
people without any resort to the vote
of the people; and in the address at the
commencement exercises of the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania last year the same
honored gentleman said TO the students
OF that institution that the 'black flag
of the corruptionist is more to be feared
than the red flag of the anarchist"
NO LONGER AN OPEN QUESTION.
need not weary you with statistics
or any jugglery of figures. They are
abundant and easy of access to prove
that hardly city in America today but
what has given away franchises for
nothing that would, If now owned by
that city, pay its entire debt and in
many cases place the city beyond the
need of levying taxation upon its citi-
zens. We have been in the habit of
condoning on the ground that the fran
chise manipulators furnished the cap
ital," but we have learned that the peo-
pie are the capital and that what the
franchise taker usually furnishes is not
capital but cunning.
The League Of American Municipal
tiles has brought out hundreds of cities