of New Salem, used to carry the
letters in his coon-skin cap and deliver them at sight; how in 1822 the
mails were carried on horseback and not in stages, so as to have the
quickest possible service; and how the news of Madison's election was
three weeks in reaching the people of Kentucky. When the telegraph
was mentioned, they told how in Revolutionary days the patriots used a
system of signalling called "Washington's Tele-graph," consisting of a
pole, a flag, a basket, and a barrel.

So, the young Republic was still within hearing distance of its
childhood, in 1876. Both in sentiment and in methods of work it
was living close to the log-cabin period. Many of the old slow ways
survived, the ways that were fast enough in the days of the stage-coach
and the tinder-box. There were seventy-seven thousand miles of railway,
but poorly built and in short lengths. There were manufacturing
industries that employed two million, four hundred thousand people, but
every trade was broken up into a chaos of small competitive units, each
at war with all the others. There were energy and enterprise in the
highest degree, but not efficiency or organization. Little as we knew
it, in 1876 we were mainly gathering together the plans and the raw
materials for the building up of the modern business world, with its
quick, tense life and its national structure of immense coordinated
industries.

In 1876 the age of specialization and community of interest was in its
dawn. The cobbler had given place to the elaborate factory, in which
seventy men cooperated to make one shoe. The merchant who had hitherto
lived over his store now ventured to have a home in the suburbs. No man
was any longer a self-sufficient Robinson Crusoe. He was a fraction,
a single part of a social mechanism, who must necessarily keep in the
closest touch with many others.

A new interdependent form of civilization was about to be developed, and
the telephone arrived in the nick of time to make this new civilization
workable and convenient. It was the unfolding of a new organ. Just as
the eye had become the telescope, and the hand had become machinery, and
the feet had become railways, so the voice became the telephone. It was
a new ideal method of communication that had been made indispensable by
new conditions. The prophecy of Carlyle had come true, when he said that
"men cannot now be bound to men by brass collars; you will have to bind
them by other far nobler and cun