The wide world is combed for news, and an incredibly short time is delivered and printed everywhere. When Pope [Leo] XIII died in Rome the fact was announced by an Associated Press dispatch in the columns of a San Francisco paper in nine minutes from the instant when he breathed his last. And this message was repeated back to London, Paris, and Rome, and gave those cities the first information of the event. When Port Arthur was taken by the Japanese in the war of 1896 it came to us in New York in fifty minutes, although it passed through twenty-seven relay offices. Few of the operators transmitting it knew what the dispatch meant. But they understood the Latin letters, and sent it on from station to station, letter by letter. When Peary came back from his great discovery in the Arctic Sea he reached Winter Harbor, on the coast of Labrador, and from there sent me a wireless message that he had nailed the Stars and Stripes to the North Pole. This went to Sydney, on Cape Breton Island, and was forwarded thence by cable and telegraph to New York. The organization is cooperative in its character. As a condition of membership, each one belonging agrees to furnish to his fellow-members, either directly or through the Association, and to them exclusively, the news of his vicinage, as gathered by him for his own paper. This constitutes the large fountain from which our American news supply is drawn. But, as in the case of the foreign official agencies, if there be danger that an individual member is biased, or if the matter be one of high importance, our own trained and salaried staff men do the reporting. For this purpose, as well as for administrative work, there is a bureau in every leading city. For the collection and interchange of this information we lease from the various telephone and telegraph companies, and operate with our own employees, something like fifty thousand miles of wires, stretching out in every direction through the country and touching every important center. To reach smaller cities, the telephone is employed. Everywhere in every land, and every moment of every day, there is ceaseless vigil for news. People frequently ask what it costs thus to collect the news of the world. And we cannot answer. Our annual budget is between three and four million dollars. But this makes no account of the work done by the individual papers all over the world in reporting the matters and handling the news over to the agencies. Neither can we estimate the number of men and women engaged in this fashion. It is easy to measure the cost of certain specific events; as, for instance, we expended twenty-eight thousand dollars to report the Martinique disaster. And the Russo-Japanese war cost us over three hundred thousand dollars.