As might have been expected, the independent movement produced a number of competent local leaders, but none of national importance. The Bell Companies, on the other hand, were officered by men who had for a quarter of a century been surveying telephone problems from a national point of view. At their head, from 1907 onwards, was Theodore N. Vail, who had returned dramatically, at the precise moment when he was needed, to finish the work that he had begun in 1878. He had been absent for twenty years, developing water-power and building street-railways in South America. In the first act of the telephone drama, it was he who put the enterprise upon a business basis, and laid down the first principles of its policy. In the second and third acts he had no place; but when the curtain rose upon the fourth act, Vail was once more the central figure, standing white-haired among his captains, and pushing forward the completion of the "grand telephonic system" that he had dreamed of when the telephone was three years old. Thus it came about that the telephone business was created by Vail, conserved by Hudson, expanded by Fish, and is now in process of being consolidated by Vail. It is being knit together into a stupendous Bell System--a federation of self-governing companies, united by a central company that is the busiest of them all. It is no longer protected by any patent monopoly. Whoever is rich enough and rash enough may enter the field. But it has all the immeasurable advantages that come from long experience, immense bulk, the most highly skilled specialists, and an abundance of capital. "The Bell System is strong," says Vail, "because we are all tied up together; and the success of one is therefore the concern of all." The Bell System! Here we have the motif of American telephone development. Here is the most comprehensive idea that has entered any telephone engineer's brain. Already this Bell System has grown to be so vast, so nearly akin to a national nerve system, that there is nothing else to which we can compare it. It is so wide-spread that few are aware of its greatness. It is strung out over fifty thousand cities and communities. If it were all gathered together into one place, this Bell System, it would make a city of Telephonia as large as Baltimore. It would contain half of the telephone property of the world. Its actual wealth would be fully $760,000,000, and its revenue would be greater than the revenue of the city of New York. Part of the property of the city of Telephonia consists of ten million poles, as many as would make a fence from New York to California, or put a stockade around Texas. If the Telephonians wished to use these poles at home, they might drive them in as piles along their water-front, and have a twenty-five thousand-acre dock; or if their city were a hundred square miles in extent, they might set up a seven-ply wall around it with these poles.