REGULATION OF PUBLIC UTILITIES 135 
ticular features would be an all engrossing occupation 
for legislators. To make a specific law for each class and 
case would seem to be an impossible undertaking. The 
Legislature of Massachusetts, which ranks high in 
intelligence, alertness, and honesty, is to-day struggling 
with the New Haven and Boston & Maine merger, and 
I venture to say that not a single legislator feels himself 
competent to the the task. If all similar questions 
required the action of the legislature, what would 
become of the docket and the time of legislators? 
The Commission 
The already established trend toward regulation by 
national or state commission, to which it is proposed 
that the exercise of regulative governmental power 
shall be delegated, brings us to a consideration some 
what in detail of the reasons for, and the possibilities 
of, the commission idea as applied to the regulation, 
under statute, of special franchises or public utilities, 
either by rate making, by taxation, or by any other 
means whatsoever. 
Mr. Henry Clews voices a pregnant truth when he 
says that a large part of the gross evils in trusts and 
syndicates and public service corporations are traceable 
to the fact that “legislatures have not kept pace with 
national progress.” Similarly, President Woodrow 
Wilson of Princeton University, says: 
The corporation lawyers of this country know what is going 
on; the legislators do not. I want to say to all corporation 
lawyers, “if you would save the corporation, you will come 
out from cover and tell the legislators what is needed. You 
know what is needed; they don’t. By telling them you will 
save the corporation. If you don’t you will have the mob at 
i its doors in a decade.”