In stores and hotels this wire traffic has grown to an almost bewildering extent, as these are the places where many interests meet. The hundred largest hotels in New York City have twenty-one thousand telephones--nearly as many as the continent of Africa and more than the kingdom of Spain. In an average year they send six million messages. The Waldorf-Astoria alone tops all residential buildings with eleven hundred and twenty telephones and five hundred thousand calls a year; while merely the Christmas Eve orders that flash into Marshall Field's store, or John Wanamaker's, have risen as high as the three thousand mark. Whether the telephone does most to concentrate population, or to scatter it, is a question that has not yet been examined. It is certainly true that it has made the skyscraper possible, and thus helped to create an absolutely new type of city, such as was never imagined even in the fairy tales of ancient nations. The skyscraper is ten years younger than the telephone. It is now generally seen to be the ideal building for business offices. It is one of the few types of architecture that may fairly be called American. And its efficiency is largely, if not mainly, due to the fact that its inhabitants may run errands by telephone as well as by elevator. There seems to be no sort of activity which is not being made more convenient by the telephone. It is used to call the duck-shooters in Western Canada when a flock of birds has arrived; and to direct the movements of the Dragon in Wagner's grand opera "Siegfried." At the last Yale-Harvard football game, it conveyed almost instantaneous news to fifty thousand people in various parts of New England. At the Vanderbilt Cup Race its wires girdled the track and reported every gain or mishap of the racing autos. And at such expensive pageants as that of the Quebec Tercentenary in 1908, where four thousand actors came and went upon a ten-acre stage, every order was given by telephone. Public officials, even in the United States, have been slow to change from the old-fashioned and more dignified use of written documents and uniformed messengers; but in the last ten years there has been a sweeping revolution in this respect. Government by telephone! This is a new idea that has already arrived in the more efficient departments of the Federal service. And as for the present Congress, that body has gone so far as to plan for a special system of its own, in both Houses, so that all official announcements may be heard by wire.