e telephone. It spent one million, eight hundred
thousand dollars on a plant that was obsolete when it was new, ran it
for a time at a loss, and then sold it to the Post Office in 1906 for
one million, five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.

So, from first to last, the story of the telephone in Great Britain has
been a "comedy of errors." There are now, in the two islands, not six
hundred thousand telephones in use. London, with its six hundred and
forty square miles of houses, has one-quarter of these, and is gaining
at the rate of ten thousand a year. No large improvements are under way,
as the Post Office has given notice that it will take over and operate
all private companies on New Year's Day, 1912. The bureaucratic muddle,
so it seems, is to continue indefinitely.

In Germany there has been the same burden of bureaucracy, but less
backing and filling. There is a complete government monopoly. Whoever
commits the crime of leasing telephone service to his neighbors may be
sent to jail for six months. Here, too, the Postmaster General has been
supreme. He has forced the telephone business into a postal mould. The
man in a small city must pay as high a rate for a small service, as the
man in a large city pays for a large service. There is a fair degree of
efficiency, but no high speed or record-breaking. The German engineers
have not kept in close touch with the progress of telephony in the
United States. They have preferred to devise methods of their own, and
so have created a miscellaneous assortment of systems, good, bad, and
indifferent. All told, there is probably an investment of seventy-five
million dollars and a total of nine hundred thousand telephones.

Telephony has always been in high favor with the Kaiser. It is his
custom, when planning a hunting party, to have a special wire strung to
the forest headquarters, so that he can converse every morning with
his Cabinet. He has conferred degrees and honors by telephone. Even
his former Chancellor, Von Buelow, received his title of Count in this
informal way. But the first friend of the telephone in Germany was
Bismarck. The old Unifier saw instantly its value in holding a nation
together, and ordered a line between his palace in Berlin and his farm
at Varzin, which lay two hundred and thirty miles apart. This was as
early as the Fall of 1877, and was thus the first long-distance line in
Europe.

In France, as in England, the Government seized upon t