. The same man who will
pay six prices for the best seed-corn, and who will allow nothing but
high-grade cattle in his barn, will at the same time be content with the
shabbiest and flimsiest telephone service, without offering any other
excuse than that it is cheap. But this is a transient phase of farm
telephony. The cost of an efficient farm system is now so little--not
more than two dollars a month, that the present trashy lines are certain
sooner or later to go to the junk-heap with the sickle and the flail and
all the other cheap and unprofitable things.

CHAPTER VII. THE TELEPHONE AND NATIONAL EFFICIENCY

The larger significance of the telephone is that it completes the work
of eliminating the hermit and gypsy elements of civilization. In an
almost ideal way, it has made intercommunication possible without
travel. It has enabled a man to settle permanently in one place, and yet
keep in personal touch with his fellows.

Until the last few centuries, much of the world was probably what
Morocco is to-day--a region without wheeled vehicles or even roads of
any sort. There is a mythical story of a wonderful speaking-trumpet
possessed by Alexander the Great, by which he could call a soldier who
was ten miles distant; but there was probably no substitute for the
human voice except flags and beacon-fires, or any faster method of
travel than the gait of a horse or a camel across ungraded plains. The
first sensation of rapid transit doubtless came with the sailing vessel;
but it was the play-toy of the winds, and unreliable. When Columbus
dared to set out on his famous voyage, he was five weeks in crossing
from Spain to the West Indies, his best day's record two hundred miles.
The swift steamship travel of to-day did not begin until 1838, when the
Great Western raced over the Atlantic in fifteen days.

As for organized systems of intercommunication, they were unknown even
under the rule of a Pericles or a Caesar. There was no post office in
Great Britain until 1656--a generation after America had begun to be
colonized. There was no English mail-coach until 1784; and when Benjamin
Franklin was Postmaster General at Philadelphia, an answer by mail from
Boston, when all went well, required not less than three weeks. There
was not even a hard-surface road in the thirteen United States until
1794; nor even a postage stamp until 1847, the year in which Alexander
Graham Bell was born. In this same year Henry Clay delivered