e telephone is that it is vastly more than
a mere convenience. It is not to be classed with safety razors and piano
players and fountain pens. It is nothing less than the high-speed tool
of civilization, gearing up the whole mechanism to more effective social
service. It is the symbol of national efficiency and cooperation.

All this the telephone is doing, at a total cost to the nation of
probably $200,000,000 a year--no more than American farmers earn in ten
days. We pay the same price for it as we do for the potatoes, or for
one-third of the hay crop, or for one-eighth of the corn. Out of every
nickel spent for electrical service, one cent goes to the telephone. We
could settle our telephone bill, and have several millions left over,
if we cut off every fourth glass of liquor and smoke of tobacco. Whoever
rents a typewriting machine, or uses a street car twice a day, or has
his shoes polished once a day, may for the same expense have a very good
telephone service. Merely to shovel away the snow of a single storm in
1910 cost the city government of New York as much as it will pay for
five or six years of telephoning.

This almost incredible cheapness of telephony is still far from being
generally perceived, mainly for psychological reasons. A telephone is
not impressive. It has no bulk. It is not like the Singer Building or
the Lusitania. Its wires and switchboards and batteries are scattered
and hidden, and few have sufficient imagination to picture them in all
their complexity. If only it were possible to assemble the hundred or
more telephone buildings of New York in one vast plaza, and if the two
thousand clerks and three thousand maintenance men and six thousand girl
operators were to march to work each morning with bands and banners,
then, perhaps, there might be the necessary quality of impressiveness by
which any large idea must always be imparted to the public mind.

For lack of a seven and one-half cent coin, there is now five-cent
telephony even in the largest American cities. For five cents whoever
wishes has an entire wire-system at his service, a system that is kept
waiting by day and night, so that it will be ready the instant he needs
it. This system may have cost from twenty to fifty millions, yet it
may be hired for one-eighth the cost of renting an automobile. Even in
long-distance telephony, the expense of a message dwindles when it is
compared with the price of a return railway ticket. A talk fro