w. At their head, from 1907 onwards, was Theodore N. Vail,
who had returned dramatically, at the precise moment when he was needed,
to finish the work that he had begun in 1878. He had been absent for
twenty years, developing water-power and building street-railways in
South America. In the first act of the telephone drama, it was he
who put the enterprise upon a business basis, and laid down the first
principles of its policy. In the second and third acts he had no place;
but when the curtain rose upon the fourth act, Vail was once more the
central figure, standing white-haired among his captains, and pushing
forward the completion of the "grand telephonic system" that he had
dreamed of when the telephone was three years old.

Thus it came about that the telephone business was created by Vail,
conserved by Hudson, expanded by Fish, and is now in process of being
consolidated by Vail. It is being knit together into a stupendous Bell
System--a federation of self-governing companies, united by a central
company that is the busiest of them all. It is no longer protected by
any patent monopoly. Whoever is rich enough and rash enough may enter
the field. But it has all the immeasurable advantages that come from
long experience, immense bulk, the most highly skilled specialists,
and an abundance of capital. "The Bell System is strong," says Vail,
"because we are all tied up together; and the success of one is
therefore the concern of all."

The Bell System! Here we have the motif of American telephone
development. Here is the most comprehensive idea that has entered any
telephone engineer's brain. Already this Bell System has grown to be so
vast, so nearly akin to a national nerve system, that there is nothing
else to which we can compare it. It is so wide-spread that few are
aware of its greatness. It is strung out over fifty thousand cities and
communities.

If it were all gathered together into one place, this Bell System, it
would make a city of Telephonia as large as Baltimore. It would contain
half of the telephone property of the world. Its actual wealth would be
fully $760,000,000, and its revenue would be greater than the revenue of
the city of New York.

Part of the property of the city of Telephonia consists of ten million
poles, as many as would make a fence from New York to California, or put
a stockade around Texas. If the Telephonians wished to use these poles
at home, they might drive them in as piles alon