IN THE COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS. 5 
of the methods of operation, would allow the establishment of 
freight rates which would seriously affect the receipts of the 
railroads. 
A. question of growing importance and one now receiving 
very careful consideration is whether electric railways should 
not be made to pay something in money, annually, to the 
various towns through which they pass, for the use of the 
highway, this payment being in the nature of compensation for 
the special use granted them of a portion of the public road, 
built by general taxation for the use of the entire community. 
Another question also under consideration in many small 
towns in the country is whether it is fair, with the demand for 
the elimination of the grade crossings, to put an excessive 
burden upon the steam railroads, when an electric railway, 
running at speeds nearly as high, is allowed to build what is 
practically a continuous grade crossing. Whether these inter- 
urban roads with their high rates of speed ought not to be 
required to have a right of way which they could fence in to 
protect the public is as yet an open question, but in all prob- 
ability the electric roads will continue to run in the highways. 
Apart from all the technical improvements made in these 
last few years in the construction of roadbeds, improvement in 
cars and in forms of overhead and underground wire construc- 
tion, the economic changes which have been caused by the 
introduction of the electric railway makes the story of its rapid 
development throughout the world one of the most striking 
features of the social life of the end of the nineteenth century. 
In Massachusetts began the first great development of the 
electric railway, and in Boston the West End Street Railway 
Company was the first in any large city to entirely equip its 
system with electricity, and in no other part of the world has 
general development of the electric railway gone on as rapidly 
as there. While in other states and countries there may be an 
equal or greater length of track, nowhere is there to be found 
such a network of electric railways tying the towns and the 
country closely together, and furnishing cheap and rapid 
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