g from what it
was in the days of Abraham Lincoln. It has enabled us to be more social
and cooperative. It has literally abolished the isolation of separate
families, and has made us members of one great family. It has become so
truly an organ of the social body that by telephone we now enter into
contracts, give evidence, try lawsuits, make speeches, propose marriage,
confer degrees, appeal to voters, and do almost everything else that is
a matter of speech.

In stores and hotels this wire traffic has grown to an almost
bewildering extent, as these are the places where many interests meet.
The hundred largest hotels in New York City have twenty-one thousand
telephones--nearly as many as the continent of Africa and more than the
kingdom of Spain. In an average year they send six million messages. The
Waldorf-Astoria alone tops all residential buildings with eleven hundred
and twenty telephones and five hundred thousand calls a year; while
merely the Christmas Eve orders that flash into Marshall Field's store,
or John Wanamaker's, have risen as high as the three thousand mark.

Whether the telephone does most to concentrate population, or to scatter
it, is a question that has not yet been examined. It is certainly true
that it has made the skyscraper possible, and thus helped to create
an absolutely new type of city, such as was never imagined even in the
fairy tales of ancient nations. The skyscraper is ten years younger than
the telephone. It is now generally seen to be the ideal building for
business offices. It is one of the few types of architecture that may
fairly be called American. And its efficiency is largely, if not mainly,
due to the fact that its inhabitants may run errands by telephone as
well as by elevator.

There seems to be no sort of activity which is not being made more
convenient by the telephone. It is used to call the duck-shooters in
Western Canada when a flock of birds has arrived; and to direct the
movements of the Dragon in Wagner's grand opera "Siegfried." At the last
Yale-Harvard football game, it conveyed almost instantaneous news to
fifty thousand people in various parts of New England. At the Vanderbilt
Cup Race its wires girdled the track and reported every gain or mishap
of the racing autos. And at such expensive pageants as that of the
Quebec Tercentenary in 1908, where four thousand actors came and went
upon a ten-acre stage, every order was given by telephone.

Public officials, e