Riches and Poverty (1910)

by L. G. Chiozza Money

(1) The conversion of all common services into monopolies, and

(2) The ownership of those monopolies by the public.

Nevertheless, the waste arising from hundreds or thousands of unnecessary centres of production and distribution is becoming better understood, and in the United Kingdom, as in America and Germany, big fish are increasingly eager to swallow the little fish. Combination in the field of production is no less common than the unification of control of stores and shops in the field of ultimate distribution. Organization is in the air, and organization, commenced by individuals for individual gain, can only end in the erection of monopolies, which, for its own safety and health, the public, sooner or later, will find itself compelled to control.

In the foregoing pages we have considered the proper use of area and the healthy housing of the people as questions urgently calling for collective action. The colonization of British land by the revival of agriculture and the redistribution of industries is ultimately bound up with the development of Transport and Power Distribution. The former is now a problem of private monopoly which we have allowed to arise. The latter will become one if we do not at once realize the possibilities of power distribution and determine that they are of so far-reaching a character as to demand public ownership from the beginning.

If we are successfully to take our industries and people out of congested centres and spread them out over a considerable area we need cheap and rapid transport and cheap and easily handled power. The transport and power transmission of the future will be electrical. It is upon record that in the early days of the steamship a Royal Commission "sat upon" the then vexed question of "Steam versus Sails," and unanimously decided that sails were the only practical wear for the Royal Navy. One is reminded of this fact when one contemplates the slow progress made by electric traction in this country, and the marked reluctance to experiment on the part of those types of private and injurious monopolists—our great railway companies. After much thought and with the assistance of a pushful American citizen our London "Underground" is, as I write, electrified, many years after electric traction was known in Darkest Africa, but so far as the greater part of our transport system is concerned we are at a standstill. The field of experiment is resigned to the Americans and the Germans.

The production and distribution of light, heat and power simply mean the production and distribution of energy in the form we call electricity, and since transport is simply motion we see that the future of lighting, heating, transport and power is the future of electricity.

In the matter of transport there is perhaps something to be said for the statesmen who, without the slightest conception of the possibilities of steam power, allowed our railways and canals to be made sources of profit for private speculators. They erred in ignorance of the magnitude and importance of the subject. There will be no such excuse if we allow the production and distribution of electrical power to become the sport of private monopolists. If there is blindness in this matter it will be wilful blindness. For each district there can be but one power supply consistently with economy, and so much hangs upon the wise distribution of power that it is most important the public should be made to realize the nature of the interests which are at stake.

The adoption of the mysterious word "Electricity" is a most unfortunate thing. If the public understood that electricity is Energy and that it is transmutable at will into Power or Light or Heat, they would better realize the possibilities of the future in town and country, and all that the proper organization and control of Energy means to them. They would at once resolve that the power of government must not be divorced from the Power which will run in the electrical mains of the future, and by the aid of which we can transform the face of our land.

Let me drop the word Electricity and use the simple term Energy. Energy will be produced at a central power station and distributed over a considerable area. The energy mains will carry the means of lighting, the means of motion (transport), the means of heating, the means of manufacturing in large, the means of manufacturing in small, the means of cooking, the means of cleaning, to every person in that area. Energy will be at the disposal of every factory, of every workshop,—and of every private house. No building will be without its motors, large or small. Smoke and all the waste and dirt of smoke will disappear.

I am not speaking of a remote future, but of possibilities which can forthwith be realized. How important it is, then, that this Energy supply, which is already entering and will increasingly enter into our everyday lives, should be publicly owned from the first. Given private ownership, the monopolists of Energy will run their mains where most profit is quickly to be garnered instead of seeking, as we should seek, first profits in the thinning out of towns and the restoration of the health of our people. If we part with the control of power, it is Power indeed which we part with. We should part, also, it is important to add, with a magnificent source of public revenue, which will amount, in the time to come, to much more than the revenue of our railways. It is only by securing the distribution of such profits by public ownership that we can make any impression upon the melancholy facts treated in the first part of this volume.