ually clarified either by amendment or by actual decisions of the courts, and as it stands to-day is pretty nearly, I think, as the Commission and the public generally would have it.

At the present time I believe every state in the Union (except Delaware and Utah) has established a commission of its own, and the District of Columbia has one. In compliance with the further suggestion of the Committee on Lectures I shall refrain from discussing the philosophy or psychology of Public Service Commissions as a whole, and shall leave that broader field to my brother Guthrie for consideration at the next meeting. But with respect to the particular Commission with which I have been intimately associated for eight years past, after an experience of twice that length of time in the City's Law Department, it is my privilege and pleasure to state that I have never seen a better esprit de corps among so many men and have never seen a larger volume of novel, difficult and important work better performed than by the members of the staffs of the various departments of the Public Service Commission. It is impossible always to satisfy the public or the corporations in the attempt to carry out the evident purpose of the Law; but I believe, gentlemen, that in the process of time, with the aid of the men themselves who represent the corporations, and with the aid and advice of the courts, and with the coöperation of the people, the conviction will be strengthened that Governor Hughes made no mistake in giving his prompt and vigorous attention to establishing a comprehensive system for the regulation and control of public utilities.

PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSIONS

A Lecture Delivered before the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, by William D. Guthrie, April 5, 1916.

In his interesting and instructive address last Wednesday evening, Mr. George S. Coleman recalled to our minds the purposes of those who in 1907 promoted the governmental experiment involved in the creation of public service commissions vested with broad powers of regulation over businesses now generically called public utilities. Most of us, I assume, agree with him that the theory of regulation by commission is sound, that these commissions ought to be continued as permanent departments of government, and that they should be made effective and satisfactory instruments for the service of the public. I want to urge this evening, although in a manner necessarily cursory and incomplete, that public service commissions can be made permanently useful and successful only by observing three conditions, namely, (1) by limiting their powers to fewer and simpler functions, (2) by appointing as commissioners men who are really experts, qualified as such by technical training and practical experience, and (3) by eliminating all exercise of judicial power, or, if any judicial power be retained, then by affording the full judicial review necessary for the protection of the rights of those whose property and business are affected by such regulation.

It seems to me that you will regard it as quite fitting and proper for me to say that no one in the employ of our state or municipality in recent years has rendered more efficient or valuable public service or service of a higher standard of professional merit than Mr. Coleman has rendered as head of the law department of the Public Service Commission for the first dis

trict.1 He was exceptionally equipped to undertake the work after sixteen years of conspicuously able service in the office of the Corporation Counsel. Certainly to his advice, management and direction as counsel to the commission under many discouraging difficulties are due in great measure whatever success has attended its work so far and whatever promise its past labors and performances hold out for the future. I believe that this is generally recognized by the profession and that it awards to him the credit he deserves.

Of the political phenomena of our times, perhaps none is more striking than the constant extension of the functions of government, with the consequent multiplication of public officials and increase of public expenditures.. The tendency to extend the activities of the state has been world-wide, for manifestations of it are observable in every country, whatever the form of government may be. In the United States we are developing at enormous cost in the most intensive fashion a multitudinous bureaucracy with autocratic powers and arbitrary discretion and a vast system of complicated and often conflicting administrative jurisdictions in business matters which reach and affect almost every individual, and most of which, only a few years ago, would have been regarded as of strictly private concern. We are vesting and combining in administrative bodies extensive legislative, administrative and judicial powers in distinct and reckless disregard of the sound principle of the separation of governmental powers which was deemed so essential by the wise founders of our governments. Even controverted questions of law and fact heretofore regarded as exclusively for judicial determination we are entrusting to bureaucratic discretion, and for orderly judicial procedure and the competent and impartial interpretation and enforcement of the laws, we are substituting arbitrary methods and untrained judgment. The increase in public functionaries and public expenditures within the past twenty years has been at a rate

1 New York.

which is regarded by many thoughtful observers with alarm as imperiling not only our liberties but the very solvency of the

state.

The particular subject of public service commissions furnishes an instructive illustration of this tendency towards bureaucracy in our national and state governments. The Federal Interstate Commerce Commission, which began its work in 1887 with a staff of a few secretaries, stenographers and messengers at an annual expenditure of $97,800, has developed into an immense bureau with an organization of 2,500 employees, and its maintenance now calls for an annual appropriation by Congress of nearly $5,000,000. So, likewise, our own Public Service Commission for the first district, which began its activities only nine years ago with a staff of 326 employees and an annual expenditure of a few hundred thousand dollars, is now operating with an organization of 2,300 employees at an annual cost of more than $3,600,000, although this staff and expense will, it is expected, be curtailed as soon as the pending rapid transit construction is completed.

Almost every state in the Union has similarly created regulatory commissions under varying names, such as public service, public utilities and railroad commissions. Not only the legislative bodies, but all of these commissions are constantly at work regulating the use of private property and exercising a control over business that is being gradually extended and broadened and made more and more oppressive year after year. Indeed, as Chief Judge Cullen warningly said in one of his opinions 1: "The great misfortune of the day is the mania for regulating all human conduct by statute, from responsibility for which few are exempt, since many of our most intelligent and highly educated citizens, who resent as paternalism and socialism legislative interference with affairs in which they are interested, are most persistent in the attempt to regulate by law the conduct of others."

1 204 N. Y. 534; 1912.

In our own state, during the past five years our legislators have enacted 3,555 separate statutes covering 11,674 printed pages of laws. The fruits of the labors of the pending session at Albany are not yet known. President Elliott, of the New Haven Railroad Company, in his recent address at Washington before the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, declared that "from 1909 to 1915 the states enacted 60,001 and Congress enacted 2,013 new laws which involved the consideration of more than one-half million legislative propositions, or an annual production of over 12,000 new laws to be assimilated by the business world," and that "the Sixty-Third Congress alone considered 30,053 bills and enacted 700." The total cost to the taxpayers of the country of the regulation of business by direct legislation and by commissions is stupendous; but, in addition to this more or less common burden imposed on the taxpayers of all classes, there is further imposed upon the businesses regulated an enormous expense in complying with statutory and administrative regulations sometimes of no practical benefit to any one, and frequently a hindrance to business. The single item of the voluminous reports and statistics which the national and state commissions require to be furnished involves an annual expense of millions of dollars to the industries being regulated. In fact, the cost of regulation so far has been out of all proportion to the service rendered by these commissions, the protection afforded, or the benefit secured.

Whilst in many respects the regulation of business by commission is still experimental, and it has yet to be proved that any such extensive and complicated bureaucratic system can be successful, or that these bodies are competent to exercise beneficially and satisfactorily the far-reaching jurisdictions and vast powers already vested in them, they are nevertheless at almost every session of Congress or state legislature having granted to them still more extensive jurisdiction and still greater powers and duties of regulation and control. They are being compelled to undertake such multiform tasks and to perform