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 de-partment. 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, regrets the passing of the independent teamster. He was much more arbitrary and expensive than any railroad has ever dared to be; and as the country grew, he became impossible. He was not the fittest to survive. For the general good, he was held back from competing with the railroad, and taught to cooperate with it by hauling freight to and from the depots. This, to his surprise, he found much more profitable and pleasant.
He had been squeezed out of a bad job into a good one. And by a similar process of evolution, the United States is rapidly outgrowing the small independent telephone companies.
These will eventually, one by one, rise as the teamster did to a higher social value, by clasping wires with the main system of telephony.
Until 1881 the Bell System was in the hands of a family group. It was a strictly private enterprise. The public had been asked to help in its launching, and had refused. But after 1881 it passed into the control of the small stock-holders, and has remained there without a break. It is now one of our most democratized businesses, scattering either wages or dividends into more than a hundred thousand homes.
It has at times been exclusive, but never sordid.
It has never been dollar-mad, nor frenzied by the virus of stock-gambling. There has always been a vein of sentiment in it that kept it in touch with human nature. Even at the present time, each check of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company carries on it a picture of a pretty Cupid, sitting on a chair upon which he has placed a thick book, and gayly prattling into a telephone.
Several sweeping changes may be expected in the near future, now that there is team-play between the Bell System and the Western Union.
Already, by a stroke of the pen, five million users of telephones have been put on the credit books of the Western Union; and every Bell telephone office is now a telegraph office. Three telephone messages and eight telegrams may be sent AT THE SAME TIME over two pairs of wires: that is one of the recent miracles of science, and is now to be tried out upon a gigantic scale.
Most of the long-distance telephone wires, fully two million miles, can be used for telegraphic purposes; and a third of the Western Union wires, five hundred thousand miles, may with a few changes be used for talking.
The Western Union is paying rent for twenty- two thousand, five hundred offices, all of which helps to make telegraphy a luxury of the few.
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 THIRT-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.
