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.