It always amuses me to hear criticisms by foreigners of the telephone as perfected in this country. And our sleeping cars and telephones are the things they invariably do criticize. As to the sleeping car there may be some justice in complaints, although it seems to me that, under the conditions for which it is designed, the Pullman car would be hard to improve upon. It is the necessity of going to bed while traveling by rail that is at the bottom of the trouble. But when a foreigner criticizes the American telephone the very thing he criticizes is its perfection. If we had bad telephone service, and didn't use the telephone much, it would be all right, according to the European point of view. But as it is, they say we are the instrument's "slaves." That was the complaint of Dr. George Brandes, the Danish literary critic. "The telephone is the worst instrument of torture that ever existed," he declared. "The medieval rack and thumb-screws were playthings compared with it." Arnold Bennett, in his "Your United States," tells of having permanently removed the receiver from the telephone in his bedroom in a Chicago hotel. His action, he declares, caused agitation, not merely in the hotel, but throughout the city. "In response to the prayer of a deputation from the management," he writes, "I restored the receiver. On the horrified face of the deputation I could read the unspoken query: 'Is it conceivable that you have been in this country a month without understanding that the United States is primarily nothing but a vast congeries of telephone cabins?'" Now, the thing which Mr. Bennett, Dr. Brandes, and many other distinguished visitors from Europe seem to fail to comprehend is this: that, being distinguished visitors, and therefore sought after, they are the telephone's especial victims, and consequently gain a wrong impression of it. They themselves use it little as a means of calling others; others use it much as a means of calling them. Furthermore, being strangers to this highly perfected instrument, they are also, quite naturally strangers to telephonic subtleties. Mr. Bennett proved his entire lack of knowledge of the new science of telephone tact when he tried to stop the instrument by removing the receiver. Any American could have told him that all he need have done was to notify the operator, at the switchboard, downstairs, not to permit him to be disturbed until a certain hour. Or, if he had wished to do so, he could have asked her to sift his messages, giving him only those she deemed desirable. He would have found her, I feel sure, as capable, on that score, as a well-trained private secretary, for, among the many effective services of the telephone, none is finer than that given by those capable, intelligent, quick-thinking young women who act as switchboard operators in large hotels and offices. I am glad of this opportunity to make my compliments to them.