his
memorable speech on the Mexican War, at Lexington, Kentucky, and it was
telegraphed to The New York Herald at a cost of five hundred dollars,
thus breaking all previous records for news-gathering enterprise. Eleven
years later the first cable established an instantaneous sign-language
between Americans and Europeans; and in 1876 there came the perfect
distance-talking of the telephone.

No invention has been more timely than the telephone. It arrived at the
exact period when it was needed for the organization of great cities
and the unification of nations. The new ideas and energies of science,
commerce, and cooperation were beginning to win victories in all parts
of the earth. The first railroad had just arrived in China; the first
parliament in Japan; the first constitution in Spain. Stanley was moving
like a tiny point of light through the heart of the Dark Continent. The
Universal Postal Union had been organized in a little hall in Berne. The
Red Cross movement was twelve years old. An International Congress of
Hygiene was being held at Brussells, and an International Congress of
Medicine at Philadelphia. De Lesseps had finished the Suez Canal and
was examining Panama. Italy and Germany had recently been built into
nations; France had finally swept aside the Empire and the Commune and
established the Republic. And what with the new agencies of railroads,
steamships, cheap newspapers, cables, and telegraphs, the civilized
races of mankind had begun to be knit together into a practical
consolidation.

To the United States, especially, the telephone came as a friend in
need. After a hundred years of growth, the Republic was still a loose
confederation of separate States, rather than one great united nation.
It had recently fallen apart for four years, with a wide gulf of blood
between; and with two flags, two Presidents, and two armies. In 1876
it was hesitating halfway between doubt and confidence, between the old
political issues of North and South, and the new industrial issues of
foreign trade and the development of material resources. The West was
being thrown open. The Indians and buffaloes were being driven back.
There was a line of railway from ocean to ocean. The population was
gaining at the rate of a million a year. Colorado had just been
baptized as a new State. And it was still an unsolved problem whether or
not the United States could be kept united, whether or not it could be
built into an organic