There was one striking lesson in telephone efficiency which Paris received in 1908, when its main exchange was totally destroyed by fire. "To build a new switchboard," said European manufacturers, "will require four or five months." A hustling young Chicagoan appeared on the scene. "We 'll put in a new switchboard in sixty days," he said; "and agree to forfeit six hundred dollars a day for delay." Such quick work had never been known. But it was Chicago's chance to show what she could do. Paris and Chicago are four thousand, five hundred miles apart, a twelve days' journey. The switchboard was to be a hundred and eighty feet in length, with ten thousand wires. Yet the Western Electric finished it in three weeks. It was rushed on six freight-cars to New York, loaded on the French steamer La Provence, and deposited at Paris in thirty-six days; so that by the time the sixty days had expired, it was running full speed with a staff of ninety operators. Russia and Austria-Hungary have now about one hundred and twenty-five thousand telephones apiece. They are neck and neck in a race that has not at any time been a fast one. In each country the Government has been a neglectful stepmother to the telephone. It has starved the business with a lack of capital and used no enterprise in expanding it. Outside of Vienna, Budapest, St. Petersburg, and Moscow there are no wire-systems of any consequence. The political deadlock between Austria and Hungary shuts out any immediate hope of a happier life for the telephone in those countries; but in Russia there has recently been a change in policy that may open up a new era. Permits are now being offered to one private company in each city, in return for three per cent of the revenue. By this step Russia has unexpectedly swept to the front and is now, to telephone men, the freest country in Europe. In tiny Switzerland there has been government ownership from the first, but with less detriment to the business than elsewhere. Here the officials have actually jilted the telegraph for the telephone. They have seen the value of the talking wire to hold their valley villages together; and so have cries-crossed the Alps with a cheap and somewhat flimsy system of telephony that carries sixty million conversations a year. Even the monks of St. Bernard, who rescue snowbound travellers, have now equipped their mountain with a series of telephone booths.