By occurrences like these an increasing number of influential citizens were convinced that the gas companies would hold a power over the comfort and daily life of the people not wise to surrender entire to any corporation. An agitation was begun for the supply of gas to the people by themselves acting through the municipality. Six thousand citizens sent a petition, in the session of 1887-88, to the Legislature to pass the necessary enabling act. There was a discussion of the project for two years. Public opinion grew more favorable every day. The citizens chartered a special train to carry a delegation to Columbus the day the pipe-line law came before the Senate. The Legislature in 1889 passed the law. It authorized the people of Toledo to issue bonds to the extent of $750,000 to buy gas land and build pipe lines. This legislation was, of course, bitterly opposed by the existing gas companies, and they demanded of the Legislature that before the law became operative it should be ratified by a three-fifths vote of the people. The friends of this scheme of municipal self-help and independence accepted the challenge. In the ensuing campaign the opposition to the people was officered by the president of one of the natural-gas companies, twice Governor of Ohio, afterwards United States Secretary of the Treasury. The natural-gas trustees of the City of Toledo in an official communication said: "There is reason to believe the money of the natural-gas companies was freely spent to defeat it."
The act was ratified April, 1889, by a vote of 7002 for to 4199 against—"a vote," say the trustees, "in which the heavy taxpayers were largely acting with the majority."[514] Organized labor took an enthusiastic part in the work of this election. The Central Labor Union held a special meeting which filled the largest public hall. Men paraded the streets with banners favoring the policy of independence. The Knights of Labor held meetings to discuss the project, and the Central Council, representing all the assemblies in the city, passed unanimously resolutions appealing to all members of the order and all working-men to support no candidate who would not pledge himself to the city pipe line. At a meeting of the glassworkers it was resolved to be "the duty of every working-man to vote 'Yes' for the pipe line next Monday." "Many of us glassworkers," said the resolutions adopted, "have been employed in factories in the Ohio Valley, receiving their natural-gas fuel from a gigantic corporation similar to that which now supplies Toledo. We have seen our employers unfairly dealt with, and arbitrarily treated in the matter of making rates. Some of them were forced to go into the courts, to prevent the extortion of the piratical company who were bent on assessing each citizen and industry at the highest rate possible, irrespective of its effect on the industries or the wages of the employés. Many manufacturers were compelled to move their plants to the cheap gas-fields of Ohio and Indiana. The employés were compelled to break up their homes and emigrate, in order to follow their trade for a livelihood." The question came before the people again the next spring, when both the Republican and Democratic parties by acclamation renominated a natural-gas trustee, whose term was expiring, to succeed himself. At the election the vote was 8958 for, and only 58 against—a practically unanimous indorsement of the project by the people.
Toledo now began to make history. "It is entirely safe to say," a well-known citizen declared in the Toledo Blade, "that in the history of this country no other people have been called to the experience which Toledo has been undergoing for the past year. Communities often are agitated and divided on questions of local policy; but no second case will be found in which a people, after settling such questions among themselves according to recognized rules, were confronted with warfare, bitter and persistent, such as this city is now called to meet, and at the hands of a combination wholly of non-residents, without the slightest proper voice in their domestic concerns." In every direct encounter with the "commons" the "lords" had been defeated—in the two years' debate which preceded the first appeal to the Legislature; in the Legislature, where the bill passed the House almost unanimously, and the Senate more than two to one; in the appeal to the voters; before the governor, who had been approached to cripple the enterprise of the municipality by naming unfriendly trustees. The gas companies had tried at each city election, after the Legislature acted in 1889, to seat in the City Council a majority in their interest; but the people, making the city pipe line the issue of the election, gave an overwhelming preponderance of their votes to the men pledged to see it through.
"Strong and subtle opposition"[515] was then brought to bear on the Common Council to prevent it from passing the necessary ordinances; but, in spite of it, both branches of the Council voted them unanimously. A clearer case of the will of the people and of law and order there could not be. A free and intelligent community, in a matter of vital concern to its industrial freedom and business prosperity, after thorough discussion, in which all sides had been freely heard, had by constitutional proceedings decided by an overwhelming majority upon a policy altogether within its legal, moral, and contract rights. The ablest lawyers, writers, and financiers that money could hire had had it under the microscope to find some breach for attack, but had not been able to find a flaw. All was constitutional, legal, proper, and expedient. A glance at the contestants brings out in clear outlines some conditions of our modern development which have come upon us almost unawares. The City of Toledo was a vigorous community of 90,000 people; its opponent was a little group of men; but they controlled in one aggregation not less than $160,000,000, besides large affairs outside of this. The assessed valuations of the property of the people on which Toledo could levy taxation was, in 1889, but $33,200,000. The total income of the municipality was $961,101; that of a single member of the little group opposing them had been acknowledged to be $9,000,000 a year, and was believed by the best informed to be several times as much. This individual income was greater than the product of all the manufactories of the city, and three times greater than the combined wages of the workmen in these establishments. There were several members of the natural-gas syndicate who collected and disbursed every year more than the community. Toledo had about the same population as Kansas in 1856. The slave power of the South that assailed the liberties of the 90,000 in Kansas numbered millions, but the new power in the North, which in a short generation had grown so strong that it did not fear to attack the 90,000 freemen of Toledo, counted only nine names. The people could act only after public deliberation, and through the slow stages of municipal and State procedure. Their antagonist met in secret council, and devised plans executed by a single hand, armed with the aggregated power of hundreds of millions of dollars, and liable, if found illegal or criminal, to only "nominal" punishment, or only 6 cents damages.[516]
At Columbus the struggle was with something very simple but extraordinarily difficult to overcome, as simple things often are—an obstinate, immovable, thoroughly angry public opinion, acting only through private voluntary means, its set will to exchange the fruits of its labor with whom and on what terms it pleased. There was absolutely no leverage to be got to bear upon the people of Columbus except by changing their feelings. Compulsion was out of the question. But at Toledo compulsion was possible. There the people had acted not through unofficial combination as at Columbus, but through the official machinery of the town and State. If the law could be turned against them by able counsel or compliant judges; if any smallest fault, however technical, could be found in the legislation of the State or the city or the practical administration of the official machinery provided for the natural-gas business of the city—if this could be done, the people of Toledo could be compelled, however little their will had changed, to see their enterprise of independence balked; this compulsion could be carried to the use of force if they resisted, and the militia of the State and the regular army could be brought into the conflict.
Such is the prize of power which tempts—more than tempts, drives as by fate—our overgrown wealth to fortify itself by control of judges, governors, presidents, commanders-in-chief—all the agents of the supreme authority and force.
Columbus was so local that its people were sufficient unto themselves. All they had to do was to keep on saying, We will not buy. But Toledo was a citizen of the great world of affairs and finance. It was part of London, New York, Chicago. Much of it was owned as an investment elsewhere. Sensitive nerves connected it with all the markets, especially the greatest of all—the money-market. It sold and bought and borrowed and lent far beyond its own border. What Wall Street gossips said about the people of Columbus would not make a dollar's difference to the whole town in a year, but a whisper started through the offices of the great capitalists in New York and abroad would flash back by wire to Toledo, and go like a quick poison through its industries and credit, private and public.
"Private enterprise" could not afford to let the people of Toledo go forward with their public enterprise. Many millions had been invested in getting control of a business representing $200,000,000. Many towns and cities, as Fostoria, Sandusky, Fremont, Clyde, Bellevue, Norwalk, Perrysburgh, Tiffin, and Detroit, were being supplied with gas at a handsome profit. If Toledo should set a successful example of self-supply, it would find imitators on every side. The essence of "private enterprise" was that the people should get their gas from Captains of Industry, and pay them for their captaincy two or three times the real cost as profit, just as monarchical countries pay kings for kindly supplying the people with the government which really comes from the people. The essence of municipal supply was that the people should supply themselves at cost without profit, and without Captains of Industry, except as the people provided them. Toledo, in fine, proposed to keep step with the modern expansion of self-government, which finds that it can apply principles and methods of democracy to industry. It proposed to add another to many demonstrations already made, noticeably in this very department of gas supply to municipalities, of the truth that the ability to carry on the business of supplying the various wants of mankind is not a sort of divine right vouchsafed from on high to a few specially inspired and gifted priests of commerce, by whose intermediation alone can the mysteries of trade be operated; but, like the ability to govern and be governed, is one of the faculties common to mankind, capable of being administered of, by, and for the people, and not needing to be differentiated as the prerogative of one set of men. The Toledo experiment was another step forward in the world-wide movement for the abolition of millionaires—a movement upon which the millionaires look with unconcealed apprehension for the welfare of their fellow-beings.
Mankind views with equanimity the expulsion of the profit-hunter from the businesses of carrying letters, minting coins, administering justice, maintaining highways, collecting taxes, in which millionaireism has been universally put an end to. It views with hopes of larger results the newer manifestations of the same tendency which in England have abolished millionaireism in telegraphs and parcel express; in Germany and France, Australia, and India have gone a long way towards the abolition of the millionaire in railroads; and in various cities and towns in Europe, America, and Australia have put up local signs, "No millionaires allowed here," by the municipalization of trade in water, gas, electricity, street-railways, baths, laundries, libraries, etc. The trust of millionaires was therefore fighting for a principle, and what will good men not sacrifice to principle!