the equipment, to receive calls, and to send a certain number of
messages, paying specifically in addition only for messages exceeding
that certain number.

Whether flat rates or measured-service rates are practiced, the general
tendency is to establish lower rates for service in homes than in
business places. This is another recognition of the justice of
graduating the rates in accordance with the amount of use.

=Units of Charging.= While both the flat-rate and the measured-rate
methods of charging for unlimited and measured service are practiced in
local exchanges, long-distance service universally is sold at message
rates. The unit of message rates in long-distance service is time. The
charge for a message between two points joined by long-distance lines
usually is a certain sum for a conversation three minutes long plus a
certain sum for each additional minute or fraction of a minute. In local
service, the message-rate time charge per message takes less account of
the time unit. The conversation is almost universally the unit in
exchanges. Some managements restrict messages of multi-party lines to
five minutes per conversation, because of the desire to avoid
withholding the line from other parties upon it for too long periods.
Service sold at public stations similarly is restricted as to time, even
though the message be local to the exchange. Three to five minutes local
conversation is sold generally for five cents in the United States. The
time of the average local message, counting actual conversation time
only, is one hundred seconds.

=Toll Service.= _Long Haul._ In long-distance service, there are two
general methods of handling traffic, as to the relations between the
calling and the called stations. For the greater distances, as between
cities not closely related because not belonging to one general
community, the calling patron calls a particular person and pays nothing
unless he holds conversation with that person. In this method, the
operator records the name of the person called for; the name, telephone
number, or both, of the person calling; the names of the towns where the
message originated and ended; the date, the time conversation began, and
the length of time it lasted.

_Short Haul._ Where towns are closely related in commercial and social
ways and where the traffic is large and approaches local service in
character, and yet where conversations between them are charged at
different rates than