a road or a fire department; and any nation that rises
to a proper conception of the telephone, that dares to put it into
competent hands and to strengthen it with enough capital, can secure as
alert and brisk a service as heart can wish. Some nations are already
on the way. China, Japan, and France have sent delegations to New York
City--"the Mecca of telephone men," to learn the art of telephony in
its highest development. Even Russia has rescued the telephone from her
bureaucrats and is now offering it freely to men of enterprise.

In most foreign countries telephone service is being steadily geared up
to a faster pace. The craze for "cheap and nasty" telephony is passing;
and the idea that the telephone is above all else a SPEED instrument,
is gaining ground. A faster long-distance service, at double rates, is
being well patronized. Slow-moving races are learning the value of time,
which is the first lesson in telephony. Our reapers and mowers now go to
seventy-five nations. Our street cars run in all great cities. Morocco
is importing our dollar watches; Korea is learning the waste of allowing
nine men to dig with one spade. And all this means telephones.

In thirty years, the Western Electric has sold sixty-seven million
dollars' worth of telephonic apparatus to foreign countries. But this
is no more than a fair beginning. To put one telephone in China to every
hundred people will mean an outlay of three hundred million dollars. To
give Europe as fit an equipment as the United States now has, will mean
thirty million telephones, with proper wire and switchboards to match.
And while telephony for the masses is not yet a live question in many
countries, sooner or later, in the relentless push of civilization, it
must come.

Possibly, in that far future of peace and goodwill among nations, when
each country does for all the others what it can do best, the United
States may be generally recognized as the source of skill and authority
on telephony. It may be called in to rebuild or operate the telephone
systems of other countries, in the same way that it is now supplying
oil and steel rails and farm machinery. Just as the wise buyer of to-day
asks France for champagne, Germany for toys, England for cottons, and
the Orient for rugs, so he will learn to look upon the United States as
the natural home and headquarters of the telephone.

CHAPTER IX. THE FUTURE OF THE TELEPHONE

In the Spring of 1907 Theodore N. Va