though it were 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