Book Description

Excerpt from Municipal Control of Public Utilities: A Study of the Attitude of Our Courts Toward an Increase of the Sphere of Municipal Activity One of the most marked characteristics of American as of European civilization is the great development of urban life. This development has been not only extensive but intensive. Cities have increased not only in number but also in size, and not only are the problems incident to urban life becoming of interest to greater and still greater numbers of persons but the solution of these problems is at the same time becoming more difficult and more necessary. One of the methods of solving these problems is the extension of the sphere of municipal activity. At one time our conception of a city, similar to our conception of the government as a whole, was that it was an organization which should preserve order and, within the limits of the law which it was its duty to enforce, permit the greatest possible freedom of action to the individual, from whose initiative and energetic activity it was believed that the community as a whole would derive the utmost advantage. It was found, however, however, that unregulated or insufficiently regulated individual activity was followed in the life of our urban communities by such evils that it became necessary to have greater and greater recourse to the repressive activity of municipal as well as state governmental organs. Such repressive activity was believed at first in many instances to be inconsistent with the guarantees of individual rights contained in our constitutions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.