of competent local leaders, but none of national importance. The Bell there still remained a fairly large assortment of independent companies; dreamed of when the telephone was three years old. any patent monopoly. Whoever is rich enough and rash enough may enter company that is the busiest of them all. It is no longer protected by twenty years, developing water-power and building street-railways in long experience, immense bulk, the most highly skilled specialists, conserved by Hudson, expanded by Fish, and is now in process of being System--a federation of self-governing companies, united by a central central figure, standing white-haired among his captains, and pushing who had returned dramatically, at the precise moment when he was needed, consolidated by Vail. It is being knit together into a stupendous Bell Companies, on the other hand, were officered by men who had for a South America. In the first act of the telephone drama, it was he Thus it came about that the telephone business was created by Vail, quarter of a century been surveying telephone problems from a national the field. But it has all the immeasurable advantages that come from "because we are all tied up together; and the success of one is who put the enterprise upon a business basis, and laid down the first to finish the work that he had begun in 1878. He had been absent for and an abundance of capital. "The Bell System is strong," says Vail, principles of its policy. In the second and third acts he had no place; As might have been expected, the independent movement produced a number point of view. At their head, from 1907 onwards, was Theodore N. Vail, but they had lost their dreams and their illusions. forward the completion of the "grand telephonic system" that he had but when the curtain rose upon the fourth act, Vail was once more the