The most brilliant feat of the telephone in the financial world was done during the panic of 1907. At the height of the storm, on a Saturday evening, the New York bankers met in an almost desperate conference. They decided, as an emergency measure of self-protection, not to ship cash to Western banks. At midnight they telephoned this decision to the bankers of Chicago and St. Louis. These men, in turn, conferred by telephone, and on Sunday afternoon called up the bankers of neighboring States. And so the news went from 'phone to 'phone, until by Monday morning all bankers and chief depositors were aware of the situation, and prepared for the team-play that prevented any general disaster. As for stockbrokers of the Wall Street species, they transact practically all their business by telephone. In their stock exchange stand six hundred and forty one booths, each one the terminus of a private wire. A firm of brokers will count it an ordinary year's talking to send fifty thousand messages; and there is one firm which last year sent twice as many. Of all brokers, the one who finally accomplished most by telephony was unquestionably E. H. Harriman. In the mansion that he built at Arden, there were a hundred telephones, sixty of them linked to the long-distance lines. What the brush is to the artist, what the chisel is to the sculptor, the telephone was to Harriman. He built his fortune with it. It was in his library, his bathroom, his private car, his camp in the Oregon wilder-ness. No transaction was too large or too involved to be settled over its wires. He saved the credit of the Erie by telephone--lent it five million dollars as he lay at home on a sickbed. "He is a slave to the telephone," wrote a magazine writer. "Nonsense," replied Harriman, "it is a slave to me." The telephone arrived in time to prevent big corporations from being unwieldy and aristocratic. The foreman of a Pittsburg coal company may now stand in his subterranean office and talk to the president of the Steel Trust, who sits on the twenty-first floor of a New York skyscraper. The long-distance talks, especially, have grown to be indispensable to the corporations whose plants are scattered and geographically misplaced--to the mills of New England, for instance, that use the cotton of the South and sell so much of their product to the Middle West. To the companies that sell perishable commodities, an instantaneous conversation with a buyer in a distant city has often saved a carload or a cargo. Such caterers as the meat-packers, who were among the first to realize what Bell had made possible, have greatly accelerated the wheels of their business by inter-city conversations. For ten years or longer the Cudahys have talked every business morning between Omaha and Boston, via fifteen hundred and seventy miles of wire.