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A study of twelve single-system cities and twenty-seven double-system cities shows that there are about eleven per cent more telephones under the double-system, and that where the second system is put in, every fifth user is obliged to pay for two telephones. The rates are alike, whether a city has one or two systems. Duplicating companies raised their rates in sixteen cities out of the twenty-seven, and reduced them in one city. Taking the United States as a whole, there are to-day fully two hundred and fifty thousand people who are paying for two telephones instead of one, an economic waste of at least ten million dollars a year. A fair-minded survey of the entire independent telephone movement would probably show that it was at first a stimulant, followed, as stimulants usually are, by a reaction. It was unquestionably for several years a spur to the Bell Companies. But it did not fulfil its promises of cheap rates, better service, and high dividends; it did little or nothing to improve telephonic apparatus, producing nothing new except the automatic switchboard--a brilliant invention, which is now in its experimental period. In the main, perhaps, it has been a reactionary and troublesome movement in the cities, and a progressive movement among the farmers. By 1907 it was a wave that had spent its force. It was no longer rolling along easily on the broad ocean of hope, but broken and turned aside by the rocks of actual conditions. One by one the telephone promoters learned the limitations of an isolated company, and asked to be included as members of the Bell family. In 1907 four hundred and fifty-eight thousand independent telephones were linked by wire to the nearest Bell Company; and in 1908 these were followed by three hundred and fifty thousand more. After this landslide to the policy of consolidation,