waiting list," like an exclusive club. In Japan one can
sell a telephone privilege at a good price, its value being daily quoted
on the Stock Exchange. Americans, by constantly using the telephone,
have developed what may be called a sixth sense, which enables them to
project their personalities over an almost unlimited area. In the
United States the telephone has become the one all-prevailing method of
communication. The European writes or telegraphs while the American
more frequently telephones. In this country the telephone penetrates
to places which even the mails never reach. The rural free delivery and
other forms of the mail service extend to 58,000 communities, while our
10,000,000 telephones encompass 70,000. We use this instrument for all
the varied experiences of life, domestic, social, and commercial. There
are residences in New York City that have private branch exchanges, like
a bank or a newspaper office. Hostesses are more and more falling into
the habit of telephoning invitations for dinner and other diversions.
Many people find telephone conversations more convenient than personal
interviews, and it is every day displacing the stenographer and the
traveling salesman.

Perhaps the most noteworthy achievement of the telephone is its
transformation of country life. In Europe, rural telephones are almost
unknown, while in the United States one-third of all our telephone
stations are in country districts. The farmer no longer depends upon
the mails; like the city man, he telephones. This instrument is thus the
greatest civilizing force we have, for civilization is very largely a
matter of intercommunication. Indeed, the telephone and other similar
agencies, such as the parcel post, the rural free delivery, better
roads, and the automobile, are rapidly transforming rural life in this
country. In several regions, especially in the Mississippi Valley, a
farmer who has no telephone is in a class by himself, like one who
has no mowing-machine. Thus the latest returns from Iowa, taken by the
census as far back as 1907, showed that seventy-three per cent of all
the farms--160,000 out of 220,000--had telephones and the proportion is
unquestionably greater now. Every other farmhouse from the Atlantic to
the Pacific contains at least one instrument. These statistics clearly
show that the telephone has removed half the terrors and isolation of
rural life. Many a lonely farmer's wife or daughter, on the approach of
a s