brought them out to air and
grow.

In the year 1873 Mr. Chamberlain was elected Mayor, and in the following
year he brought forward his schemes for the purchase by the municipality
of the gas and water supplies. His proposals encountered very formidable
opposition, principally from those interested in the gas and water
companies, whose undertakings he proposed compulsorily to purchase. Some
of the shareholders in these prosperous companies were fierce in their
denunciations of his schemes. They regarded Mr. Chamberlain's proposals
as nothing short of confiscation. For years they had supplied the town
with gas and water. They had found the necessary money in the "sure and
certain hope" of having a good and secure investment for their capital,
and lo! when they had fairly established their undertakings, it was
proposed to blow out their profitable light and dash the refreshingly
remunerative water from their lips. It was hard--I don't mean the
water, but the situation! Of course the shareholders were to receive a
fair price for their properties, the gas companies practically
L1,900.000, the waterworks company L1,350,000. But still they were not
happy. They resisted the proposed purchases.

Mr. Chamberlain, however, was not the man to be daunted by the
opposition of the gas and water company proprietors. He had made up his
mind that it would be for the good of the town for these undertakings to
be in the hands of the municipality, and in spite of the Town Council
"old gang" and outraged gas and water shareholders, who felt they were
being fraudulently despoiled of certain prospective advantages, he
carried his point.

There are still those among us who, for various reasons, murmur at these
extensive purchases. They maintain, for one thing, that the possession
of the gas influenced the Corporation to turn a discouraging eye upon
the electric light. Certainly Birmingham has been rather lax in taking
up electric illumination, and possibly more enterprise would have been
evinced in this direction if the Corporation had not become dealers in
gas and water on their own terms, viz., no competition allowed. Some
self-constituted prophets shook their heads and said that before the gas
debt was paid off gas would literally have "gone out" as a general
illuminant. Before the eighty-five years allowed for the redemption of
the capital invested in the gas have elapsed a good many things may
certainly happen. So far, however, gas is