gy as to get the largest results. To get
a question asked and answered in five minutes by means of an electric
wire, instead of in two hours by the slow trudging of a messenger
boy--that is the method that best suits our passion for instantaneous
service.

It is one of the few social laws of which we are fairly sure, that
a nation organizes in proportion to its velocity. We know that a
four-mile-an-hour nation must remain a huge inert mass of peasants and
villagers; or if, after centuries of slow toil, it should pile up a
great city, the city will sooner or later fall to pieces of its own
weight. 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
vibrations of speech between Boston and Salem, a new era began. In came
the era of speed and the finely organized nations. In came cities of
unprecedented bulk, but held together so closely by a web-work of steel
rails and copper wires that they have become more alert and cooperative
than any tiny hamlet of mud huts on the banks of the Congo.

That the telephone is now doing most of all, in this binding together
of all manner of men, is perhaps not too much to claim, when we remember
that there are now in the United States seventy thousand holders of Bell
telephone stock and ten million users of telephone service. There are
two hundred and sixty-four wires crossing the 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 speaks all languages and serves all
trades. It helps to prevent sectionalism and race feuds. It gives
a common meeting place to capitalists and wage-workers. It is so
essentially the instrument of all the people, in fact, that we might
almost point to it as a national emblem, as the trade-mark of democracy
and the American spirit.

In a country like ours, where there are eighty nationalities in the
public schools, the telephone has a peculiar value as a part of the
national digestive apparatus. It prevent