l not be competitive, for the reason that no farmer would think
for a moment of running his farm on competitive lines. It will have
a staff-and-line organization, to use a military phrase. Each local
company will continue to handle its own local affairs, and exercise to
the full the basic virtue of self-help. But there will also be, as now,
a central body of experts to handle the larger affairs that are common
to all companies. No separateness or secession on the one side, nor
bureaucracy on the other--that is the typically American idea that
underlies the ideal telephone system.

The line of authority, in such a system, will begin with the local
manager. From him it will rise to the directors of the State company;
then higher still to the directors of the national company; and finally,
above all corporate leaders to the Federal Government itself. The
failure of government ownership of the telephone in so many foreign
countries does not mean that the private companies will have absolute
power. Quite the reverse. The lesson of thirty years' experience shows
that a private telephone company is apt to be much more obedient to the
will of the people than if it were a Government department. But it is
an axiom of democracy that no company, however well conducted, will be
permitted to control a public convenience without being held strictly
responsible for its own acts. As politics becomes less of a game and
more of a responsibility, the telephone of the future will doubtless be
supervised by some sort of public committee, which will have power to
pass upon complaints, and to prevent the nuisance of duplication and the
swindle of watering stock.

As this Federal supervision becomes more and more efficient, the present
fear of monopoly will decrease, just as it did in the case of the
railways. It is a fact, although now generally forgotten, that the
first railways of the United States were run for ten years or more on
an anti-monopoly plan. The tracks were free to all. Any one who owned
a cart with flanged wheels could drive it on the rails and compete with
the locomotives. There was a happy-go-lucky jumble of trains and wagons,
all held back by the slowest team; and this continued on some railways
until as late as 1857. By that time the people saw that com-petition on
a railway track was absurd. They allowed each track to be monopolized by
one company, and the era of expansion began.

No one, certainly, at the present time,