hs of them are in the tiny
island of Japan. The Japanese were enthusiastic telephonists from the
first. They had a busy exchange in Tokio in 1883. This has now grown to
have twenty-five thousand users, and might have more, if it had not been
stunted by the peculiar policy of the Government. The public officials
who operate the system are able men. They charge a fair price and make
ten per cent profit for the State. But they do not keep pace with the
demand. It is one of the oddest vagaries of public ownership that there
is now in Tokio a WAITING LIST of eight thousand citizens, who are
offering to pay for telephones and cannot get them. And when a Tokian
dies, his franchise to a telephone, if he has one, is usually itemized
in his will as a four-hundred-dollar property.

India, which is second on the Asiatic list, has no more than nine
thousand telephones--one to every thirty-three thousand of her
population! Not quite so many, in fact, as there are in five of the
skyscrapers of New York. The Dutch East Indies and China have only
seven thousand apiece, but in China there has recently come a
forward movement. A fund of twenty million dollars is to be spent in
constructing a national system of telephone and telegraph. Peking is now
pointing with wonder and delight to a new exchange, spick and span, with
a couple of ten-thousand-wire switchboards. Others are being built in
Canton, Hankow, and Tien-Tsin. Ultimately, the telephone will flourish
in China, as it has done in the Chinese quarter in San Francisco. The
Empress of China, after the siege of Peking, commanded that a telephone
should be hung in her palace, within reach of her dragon throne; and
she was very friendly with any representative of the "Speaking Lightning
Sounds" business, as the Chinese term telephony.

In Persia the telephone made its entry recently in true comic-opera
fashion. A new Shah, in an outburst of confidence, set up a wire between
his palace and the market-place in Teheran, and invited his people to
talk to him whenever they had grievances. And they talked! They talked
so freely and used such language, that the Shah ordered out his soldiers
and attacked them. He fired upon the new Parliament, and was at once
chased out of Persia by the enraged people. From this it would appear
that the telephone ought to be popular in Persia, although at present
there are not more than twenty in use.

South America, outside of Buenos Ayres, has few telephones,