i 3 8 
THE A B C OF TAXATION 
to-day towers above all the rest, it is the problem of 
railway regulation. The avowed aim of what is known 
as the New York Ford Amendment is to facilitate 
the raising of revenue. It contains no suggestion of 
possible extension to include the far higher and more 
difficult function of regulation. There are those who 
believe that the vexatious perplexities of this, as of all 
other public franchise problems, will prove more 
amenable to the correcting tendencies of taxation than 
to any other agency. Legislative regulation is, at best, 
clumsy and intermittent, often amounting to a weak 
confession that hostility of interests cannot be con 
verted into harmony. Taxation is neither of these, 
but is elastic, self-adjustable, and self-operative. The 
best hope of any graft extermination must reside in 
taxation — the taxation of special privilege. Would 
any one maintain that change for the worse is possible 
in American graft of to-day? Is the public graft of a 
corporate city worse than the private graft of all its 
constituent citizens? Are not the people the victims 
in either case, and cannot graft be resisted more con 
cretely and thus more effectively by the arm of a strong 
individual executive than by the slower instrumentali 
ties of public administration? 
It will be profitable, in approaching the problem, to 
analyse in our own minds what is meant by the phrases 
public utilities, quasi-public corporations, semi-public 
functions. We mean, do we not, that a part is public 
business and a part is private business; that one part 
of their capital is public, another part private: that 
one part of their function is public and one part 
individual; that one part of their value rests on fran 
chise, the other part on equipment and operation?