l, less unified,
less progressive, and less efficient. It belongs to an inferior species.

How to make a civilization that is organized and quick, instead of
a barbarism that was chaotic and slow--that is the universal human
problem, not wholly solved to-day. And how to develop a science of
intercommunication, which commenced when the wild animals began to
travel in herds and to protect themselves from their enemies by a
language of danger-signals, and to democratize this science until the
entire nation becomes self-conscious and able to act as one living
being--that is the part of this universal problem which finally
necessitated the invention of the telephone.

With the use of the telephone has come a new habit of mind. The slow and
sluggish mood has been sloughed off. The old to-morrow habit has been
superseded by "Do It To-day"; and life has become more tense, alert,
vivid. The brain has been relieved of the suspense of waiting for an
answer, which is a psychological gain of great importance. It receives
its reply at once and is set free to consider other matters. There is
less burden upon the memory and the WHOLE MIND can be given to each new
proposition.

A new instinct of speed has been developed, much more fully in the
United States than elsewhere. "No American goes slow," said Ian
Maclaren, "if he has the chance of going fast; he does not stop to talk
if he can talk walking; and he does not walk if he can ride." He is as
pleased as a child with a new toy when some speed record is broken,
when a pair of shoes is made in eleven minutes, when a man lays twelve
hundred bricks in an hour, or when a ship crosses the Atlantic in
four and a half days. Even seconds are now counted and split up into
fractions. The average time, for instance, taken to reply to a telephone
call by a New York operator, is now three and two-fifth seconds; and
even this tiny atom of time is being strenuously worn down.

As a witty Frenchman has said, one of our most lively regrets is that
while we are at the telephone we cannot do business with our feet. We
regard it as a victory over the hostility of nature when we do an hour's
work in a minute or a minute's work in a second. Instead of saying, as
the Spanish do, "Life is too short; what can one person do?" an American
is more apt to say, "Life is too short; therefore I must do to-day's
work to-day." To pack a lifetime with energy--that is the American plan,
and so to economize that ener