regrets the passing of the
independent teamster. He was much more arbitrary and expensive than
any railroad has ever dared to be; and as the country grew, he became
impossible. He was not the fittest to survive. For the general good, he
was held back from competing with the railroad, and taught to cooperate
with it by hauling freight to and from the depots. This, to his
surprise, he found much more profitable and pleasant. He had been
squeezed out of a bad job into a good one. And by a similar process of
evolution, the United States is rapidly outgrowing the small independent
telephone companies. These will eventually, one by one, rise as the
teamster did to a higher social value, by clasping wires with the main
system of telephony.

Until 1881 the Bell System was in the hands of a family group. It was
a strictly private enterprise. The public had been asked to help in its
launching, and had refused. But after 1881 it passed into the control of
the small stock-holders, and has remained there without a break. It is
now one of our most democratized businesses, scattering either wages or
dividends into more than a hundred thousand homes. It has at times been
exclusive, but never sordid. It has never been dollar-mad, nor frenzied
by the virus of stock-gambling. There has always been a vein of
sentiment in it that kept it in touch with human nature. Even at the
present time, each check of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company
carries on it a picture of a pretty Cupid, sitting on a chair upon which
he has placed a thick book, and gayly prattling into a telephone.

Several sweeping changes may be expected in the near future, now that
there is team-play between the Bell System and the Western Union.
Already, by a stroke of the pen, five million users of telephones
have been put on the credit books of the Western Union; and every Bell
telephone office is now a telegraph office. Three telephone messages and
eight telegrams may be sent AT THE SAME TIME over two pairs of wires:
that is one of the recent miracles of science, and is now to be tried
out upon a gigantic scale. Most of the long-distance telephone wires,
fully two million miles, can be used for telegraphic purposes; and a
third of the Western Union wires, five hundred thousand miles, may with
a few changes be used for talking.

The Western Union is paying rent for twenty-two thousand, five hundred
offices, all of which helps to make telegraphy a luxury of the fe