elements of civilization. In an almost ideal way, it has made intercommunication possible without travel.

but there was probably no substitute for the human voice except flags and beacon-fires, or any faster method of travel than the gait of a horse or a camel across ungraded plains. The first sensation of rapid transit doubtless came with the sailing vessel; but it was the play-toy of the winds, a

r by mail from Boston, when all went well, required not less than three weeks. There was not even a hard-surface road in the thirteen United States until 1794; nor even a postage stamp until 1847, the year in which Alexander Graham Bell was born. In this same year Henry Clay delivered his memorable speech on the Mexican War, at Lexington

irst constitution in Spain. Stanley was moving like a tiny point of light through the heart of the Dark Continent. The Universal Postal Union had been organized in a little hall in Berne. The Red Cross movement was twelve years old. An International Congress of Hygiene was being held at Brussells, and an International Congress of Medicine at Philadelphia. De Lesseps had finish

two armies. In 1876 it was hesitating halfway between doubt and confidence, between the old political issues of North and South, and the new industrial issues of foreign trade and the development of material resources. The West was being thrown open. The Indians and buffaloes were being driven back. There was a line of railway

the railways, banks, libraries, newspapers, exports, farm values, and national wealth. We have ten million farmers who make four times as much money as seven million farmers made in 1876. We spend four times as much on our public schools, and we put four times as much in the s

Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Arizona was about equal to that of Des Moines. It was in this year that General Custer was killed by the Sioux; that the flimsy iron railway bridge fell at As

till alive; so were Commodore Vanderbilt, Joseph Henry, A. T. Stewart, Thurlow Weed, Peter Cooper, Cyrus McCormick, Lucretia Mott, Bryant, Longfellow, and Emerson. Most old people could remember the ru

o be governed but by a despotic monarchy." They told how Abraham Lincoln, when he was postmaster of New Salem, used to carry the letters in his coon-skin cap and deliver them at sight; how in 1822 the mails were carried on horseback and not in stages, so as to have the quickest possible servi

eventy-seven thousand miles of railway, but poorly built and in short lengths. There were manufacturing industries that employed two million, four hundred thousand people, but every trade was broken up into a chaos of small competitive units, each at war with all the others. There were energy and en

cooperated to make one shoe. The merchant who had hitherto lived over his store now ventured to have a home in the suburbs. No man was any longer a se

ust as the eye had become the telescope, and the hand had become machinery, and the feet had become railways, so the voice became the telephone. It was a new ideal method of communication that had been made i

o that they could communicate by a sort of deaf and dumb alphabet. And then came the telephone, giving direct instantaneous communication and putting the people of each nation within hearing distance of eac

transmission of important news. But to make the electric wire carry speech was MOST, because it put all fellow-citizens face to face, and made both message and answer instantaneous. T

ifts in Winter, heat in Summer-could not get their horses out of a walk. But we found that the air and the earth were full of electricity, and alwa

y to arrive at the value of the telephone is to consider the nation as a whole, to take it all in all as a going concern, and to note that such a nation would be absolutely impossible without its telephone service. Some sort of a slower and lower grade republic we might have, with small industrial unit

ence of intercommunication, which commenced when the wild animals began to travel in herds and to protect themselves from their enemies by a language of danger-signals, and to democratize this

ay"; and life has become more tense, alert, vivid. The brain has been relieved of the suspense of waiting for an answer, which is a psychological gain of great importan

f he can ride." He is as pleased as a child with a new toy when some speed record is broken, when a pair of shoes is made in eleven minutes, when a man lays twelve hundred bricks in an hour, or when a ship crosses the Atlantic in four and a half day

. Instead of saying, as the Spanish do, "Life is too short; what can one person do?" an American is more apt to say, "Life is too short; therefore I must do to-day's work to-day." To pack a lifetime with energy-that is the American plan, and so to economize th

ht. In such a way Babylon rose and fell, and Nineveh, and Thebes, and Carthage, and Rome. Mere bulk, unorganized, becomes its own destroyer. It dies of clogging and congestion. But when Stephenson's Rocket ran twenty-nine miles an hour, and Morse's telegraph clicked its signals from Washington to Baltimore, and Bell's telephone flashed the v

Mississippi, in the Bell system; and five hundred and forty-four crossing Mason and Dixon's Line. It is the telephone which does most to link together cottage and skyscraper and mansion and factory and farm. It is not limited to experts or college graduates. It reaches the man with a nickel as well as the man with a million. It

t the humble immigrants from Southern Europe, before they have been here half a dozen years, have acquired the telephone habit and have linked on their small shops to the great wire network of intercommunication. In the one community of Brownsville, for example, settled several ye

ke the telephone as universal as the water faucet, to bring within speaking distance every economic unit, to connect to the social organism every person who may at any time be needed. Just as the click of the reaper means bre

enty-one seconds. We have not been satisfied with establishing such a system of transportation that we can start any day for anywhere from anywhere else; neither have we been satisfied with establishing such a system of communication that news and gossip are the common property of all nati

f the human race. And thus the larger truth about the telephone is that it is vastly more than a mere convenience. It is not to be classed with safety razors and piano players and fountain

f every nickel spent for electrical service, one cent goes to the telephone. We could settle our telephone bill, and have several millions left over, if we cut off every fourth glass of liquor and smoke of tobacco. Whoever rents a typewriting machine, or uses a street

atteries are scattered and hidden, and few have sufficient imagination to picture them in all their complexity. If only it were possible to assemble the hundred or more telephone buildings of New York in one vast plaza, and if the two thousand clerks and th

. This system may have cost from twenty to fifty millions, yet it may be hired for one-eighth the cost of renting an automobile. Even in long-distance telephony, the expense of a message dwindles when it is compared with the price of a return railway ticket. A talk from New York to

companies. No such fortunes were made. "I do not believe," says Theodore Vail, "that any one man ever made a clear million out of the telephone." There are not apt to be any get-rich-quick for-tunes made in corporations that issue no watered stock and do not capitalize their franchises. On the contrary, up

ixty thousand dollars. Buffalo expected to pay three thousand dollars and had to pay one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Also, they made the unwelcome discovery that an exchange of tw

......

......

st....

s.....

nance.

nds...

......

$

It persisted in holding to a local and individualistic view of its business. It was slow to put telephones in unprofitable places. It expected every instrument to pay its way. I

o any other pur-pose. It is not at all like a piano or a talking-machine, which has a separate existence. It is useful only in proportion to the number of other telep

n a most practical way by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which at its own expense installed five hundred and twenty-five telephones in the homes of its workmen in Altoona. In the same way, it is clearly the social duty of the telephone company to widen out its system until every point is covered, and then to distribute its gross charges as fairly as it can. The whole must c

ssemer converter, the telephone, in the last analysis, COSTS NOTHING; IT I