ven in the United States, have been slow to change
from the old-fashioned and more dignified use of written documents
and uniformed messengers; but in the last ten years there has been a
sweeping revolution in this respect. Government by telephone! This is a
new idea that has already arrived in the more efficient departments of
the Federal service. And as for the present Congress, that body has gone
so far as to plan for a special system of its own, in both Houses, so
that all official announcements may be heard by wire.

Garfield was the first among American Presidents to possess a telephone.
An exhibition instrument was placed in his house, without cost, in 1878,
while he was still a member of Congress. Neither Cleveland nor Harrison,
for temperamental reasons, used the magic wire very often. Under their
regime, there was one lonely idle telephone in the White House, used by
the servants several times a week. But with McKinley came a new order of
things. To him a telephone was more than a necessity. It was a pastime,
an exhilarating sport. He was the one President who really revelled in
the comforts of telephony. In 1895 he sat in his Canton home and heard
the cheers of the Chicago Convention. Later he sat there and ran
the first presidential telephone campaign; talked to his managers in
thirty-eight States. Thus he came to regard the telephone with a higher
degree of appreciation than any of his predecessors had done, and
eulogized it on many public occasions. "It is bringing us all closer
together," was his favorite phrase.

To Roosevelt the telephone was mainly for emergencies. He used it to the
full during the Chicago Convention of 1907 and the Peace Conference at
Portsmouth. But with Taft the telephone became again the common avenue
of conversation. He has introduced at least one new telephonic custom a
long-distance talk with his family every evening, when he is away from
home. Instead of the solitary telephone of Cleveland-Harrison days, the
White House has now a branch exchange of its own--Main 6--with a sheaf
of wires that branch out into every room as well as to the nearest
central.

Next to public officials, bankers were perhaps the last to accept the
facilities of the telephone. They were slow to abandon the fallacy that
no business can be done without a written record. James Stillman, of New
York, was first among bankers to foresee the telephone era. As early
as 1875, while Bell was teaching his infant