e four times as
many; in ten years there were eight to one. What with the message rate
and the pay station, the telephone was now on its way to be universal.
It was adapted to all kinds and conditions of men. A great corporation,
nerved at every point with telephone wires, may now pay fifty thousand
dollars to the Bell Company, while at the same time a young Irish
immigrant boy, just arrived in New York City, may offer five coppers and
find at his disposal a fifty million dollar telephone system.

When the message rate was fairly well established, Hudson died--fell
suddenly to the ground as he was about to step into a railway carriage.
In his place came Frederick P. Fish, also a lawyer and a Bostonian. Fish
was a popular, optimistic man, with a "full-speed-ahead" temperament.
He pushed the policy of expansion until he broke all the records. He
borrowed money in stupendous amounts--$150,000,000 at one time--and
flung it into a campaign of red-hot development. More business he
demanded, and more, and more, until his captains, like a thirty-horse
team of galloping horses, became very nearly uncontrollable.

It was a fast and furious period. The whole country was ablaze with a
passion of prosperity. After generations of conflict, the men with large
ideas had at last put to rout the men of small ideas. The waste
and folly of competition had everywhere driven men to the policy of
cooperation. Mills were linked to mills and factories to factories, in
a vast mutualism of industry such as no other age, perhaps, has ever
known. And as the telephone is essentially the instrument of co-working
and interdependent people, it found itself suddenly welcomed as the most
popular and indispensable of all the agencies that put men in touch with
each other.

To describe this growth in a single sentence, we might say that the
Bell telephone secured its first million of capital in 1879; its first
million of earnings in 1882; its first million of dividends in 1884; its
first million of surplus in 1885. It had paid out its first million for
legal expenses by 1886; began first to send a million messages a day
in 1888; had strung its first million miles of wire in 1900; and had
installed its first million telephones in 1898. By 1897 it had spun as
many cobwebs of wire as the mighty Western Union itself; by 1900 it had
twice as many miles of wire as the Western Union, and in 1905 FIVE TIMES
as many. Such was the plunging progress of the Bell Com