w. It
is employing as large a force of messenger-boys as the army that marched
with General Sherman from Atlanta to the sea. Both of these items of
expense will dwindle when a Bell wire and a Morse wire can be brought to
a common terminal; and when a telegram can be received or delivered by
telephone. There will also be a gain, perhaps the largest of all, in
removing the trudging little messenger-boy from the streets and sending
him either to school or to learn some useful trade.

The fact is that the United States is the first country that has
succeeded in putting both telephone and telegraph upon the proper basis.

Elsewhere either the two are widely apart, or the telephone is a mere
adjunct of a telegraphic department. According to the new American plan,
the two are not competitive, but complementary. The one is a supplement
to the other. The post office sends a package; the telegraph sends
the contents of the package; but the telephone sends nothing. It is an
apparatus that makes conversation possible between two separated people.
Each of the three has a distinct field of its own, so that there has
never been any cause for jealousy among them.

To make the telephone an annex of the post office or the telegraph has
become absurd. There are now in the whole world very nearly as many
messages sent by telephone as by letter; and there are THIRTY-TWO
TIMES as many telephone calls as telegrams. In the United States, the
telephone has grown to be the big brother of the telegraph. It has six
times the net earnings and eight times the wire. And it transmits as
many messages as the combined total of telegrams, letters, and railroad
passengers.

This universal trend toward consolidation has introduced a variety of
problems that will engage the ablest brains in the telephone world for
many years to come. How to get the benefits of organization without its
losses, to become strong without losing quickness, to become systematic
without losing the dash and dare of earlier days, to develop the
working force into an army of high-speed specialists without losing the
bird's-eye view of the whole situation,--these are the riddles of the
new type, for which the telephonists of the next generation must
find the answers. They illustrate the nature of the big jobs that the
telephone has to offer to an ambitious and gifted young man of to-day.

"The problems never were as large or as complex as they are right now,"
says J. J. Carty, th