Excerpt from The Regulation of Municipal Utilities At the first meeting of the National Municipal League, held in Minneapolis in December, 1894, a paper on "Some Essentials of Good City Government in the Way of Granting Franchises," by Edward W. Bemis, was presented. From that time on the subject of public utility franchises has been considered at length at the various sessions of the League. There have been numerous papers describing local conditions, with comments on the lessons involved; there have been numerous suggestions as to the ways and means of handling the franchise problem in American cities; there have been authoritative articles on the various movements, state and municipal, to control franchises in the interest of the people; there have been sundry propositions looking toward a solution of the several phases of the problem: there have been carefully prepared reports; and, above all, there were the formal recommendations of the Committee on Municipal Program promulgated in 1900, which have been widely followed and generally concurred in. 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.