ens from
an observatory on Monte Rosa. At her own expense, the Queen had this
wire strung by a crew of linemen, who slipped and floundered on the
mountain for six years before they had it pegged in place. The general
situation in Italy is like that in Great Britain. The Government has
always monopolized the long-distance lines, and is now about to buy out
all private companies. There are only fifty-five thousand telephones
to thirty-two million people--as many as in Norway and less than in
Denmark. And in many of the southern and Sicilian provinces the jingle
of the telephone bell is still an unfamiliar sound.

The main peculiarity in Holland is that there is no national plan, but
rather a patchwork, that resembles Joseph's coat of many colors. Each
city engineer has designed his own type of apparatus and had it made to
order. Also, each company is fenced in by law within a six-mile circle,
so that Holland is dotted with thumb-nail systems, no two of which are
alike. In Belgium there has been a government system since 1893, hence
there is unity, but no enterprise. The plant is old-fashioned and too
small. Spain has private companies, which give fairly good service to
twenty thousand people. Roumania has half as many. Portugal has two
small companies in Lisbon and Oporto. Greece, Servia, and Bulgaria have
a scanty two thousand apiece. The frozen little isle of Iceland has
one-quarter as many; and even into Turkey, which was a forbidden land
under the regime of the old Sultan, the Young Turks are importing boxes
of telephones and coils of copper wire.

There is one European country, and only one, which has caught the
telephone spirit--Sweden. Here telephony had a free swinging start.
It was let alone by the Post Office; and better still, it had a Man, a
business-builder of remarkable force and ability, named Henry Cedergren.
Had this man been made the Telephone-Master of Europe, there would have
been a different story to tell. By his insistent enterprise he made
Stockholm the best telephoned city outside of the United States. He
pushed his country forward until, having one hundred and sixty-five
thousand telephones, it stood fourth among the European nations. Since
his death the Government has entered the field with a duplicate system,
and a war has been begun which grows yearly more costly and absurd.

Asia, as yet, with her eight hundred and fifty million people, has fewer
telephones than Philadelphia, and three-fourt