olated companies that at a recent
convention of telephone agents, the chairman's gavel was made of
thirty-five pieces of wood, taken from thirty-five switchboards of
thirty-five extinct companies.

A study of twelve single-system cities and twenty-seven double-system
cities shows that there are about eleven per cent more telephones under
the double-system, and that where the second system is put in, every
fifth user is obliged to pay for two telephones. The rates are alike,
whether a city has one or two systems. Duplicating companies raised
their rates in sixteen cities out of the twenty-seven, and reduced them
in one city. Taking the United States as a whole, there are to-day fully
two hundred and fifty thousand people who are paying for two telephones
instead of one, an economic waste of at least ten million dollars a
year.

A fair-minded survey of the entire independent telephone movement would
probably show that it was at first a stimulant, followed, as stimulants
usually are, by a reaction. It was unquestionably for several years a
spur to the Bell Companies. But it did not fulfil its promises of cheap
rates, better service, and high dividends; it did little or nothing to
improve telephonic apparatus, producing nothing new except the automatic
switchboard--a brilliant invention, which is now in its experimental
period. In the main, perhaps, it has been a reactionary and troublesome
movement in the cities, and a progressive movement among the farmers.

By 1907 it was a wave that had spent its force. It was no longer rolling
along easily on the broad ocean of hope, but broken and turned aside
by the rocks of actual conditions. One by one the telephone promoters
learned the limitations of an isolated company, and asked to be included
as members of the Bell family. In 1907 four hundred and fifty-eight
thousand independent telephones were linked by wire to the nearest Bell
Company; and in 1908 these were followed by three hundred and fifty
thousand more. After this landslide to the policy of consolidation,
there still remained a fairly large assortment of independent companies;
but they had lost their dreams and their illusions.

As might have been expected, the independent movement produced a number
of competent local leaders, but none of national importance. The Bell
Companies, on the other hand, were officered by men who had for a
quarter of a century been surveying telephone problems from a national
point of vie