s the growth of dialects and
helps on the process of assimilation. Such is the push of American life,
that the humble immigrants from Southern Europe, before they have been
here half a dozen years, have acquired the telephone habit and
have linked on their small shops to the great wire network of
intercommunication. In the one community of Brownsville, for example,
settled several years ago by an overflow of Russian Jews from the East
Side of New York, there are now as many telephones as in the kingdom of
Greece. And in the swarming East Side itself, there is a single exchange
in Orchard Street which has more wires than there are in all the
exchanges of Egypt.

There can be few higher ideals of practical democracy than that which
comes to us from the telephone engineer. His purpose is much more
comprehensive than the supplying of telephones to those who want them.
It is rather to make the telephone as universal as the water faucet, to
bring within speaking distance every economic unit, to connect to the
social organism every person who may at any time be needed. Just as
the click of the reaper means bread, and the purr of the sewing-machine
means clothes, and the roar of the Bessemer converter means steel, and
the rattle of the press means education, so the ring of the telephone
bell has come to mean unity and organization.

Already, by cable, telegraph, and telephone, no two towns in the
civilized world are more than one hour apart. We have even girdled the
earth with a cablegram in twelve minutes. We have made it possible for
any man in New York City to enter into conversation with any other
New Yorker in twenty-one seconds. We have not been satisfied with
establishing such a system of transportation that we can start any day
for anywhere from anywhere else; neither have we been satisfied with
establishing such a system of communication that news and gossip are
the common property of all nations. We have gone farther. We have
established in every large region of population a system of voice-nerves
that puts every man at every other man's ear, and which so magically
eliminates the factor of distance that the United States becomes three
thousand miles of neighbors, side by side.

This effort to conquer Time and Space is above all else the instinct
of material progress. To shrivel up the miles and to stretch out the
minutes--this has been one of the master passions of the human race. And
thus the larger truth about th