In the operation of trains, the railroads have waited thirty years before they dared to trust the telephone, just as they waited fifteen years before they dared to trust the telegraph. In 1883 a few railways used the telephone in a small way, but in 1907, when a law was passed that made telegraphers highly expensive, there was a general swing to the telephone. Several dozen roads have now put it in use, some employing it as an associate of the Morse method and others as a complete substitute. It has already been found to be the quickest way of despatching trains. It will do in five minutes what the telegraph did in ten. And it has enabled railroads to hire more suitable men for the smaller offices. In news-gathering, too, much more than in railroading, the day of the telephone has arrived. The Boston Globe was the first paper to receive news by telephone. Later came The Washington Star, which had a wire strung to the Capitol, and thereby gained an hour over its competitors. To-day the evening papers receive most of their news over the wire a la Bell instead of a la Morse. This has resulted in a specialization of reporters--one man runs for the news and another man writes it. Some of the runners never come to the office. They receive their assignments by telephone, and their salaries by mail. There are even a few who are allowed to telephone their news directly to a swift linotype operator, who clicks it into type on his machine, without the scratch of a pencil. This, of course, is the ideal method of news-gathering, which is rarely possible. A paper of the first class, such as The New York World, has now an outfit of twenty trunk lines and eighty telephones. Its outgoing calls are two hundred thousand a year and its incoming calls three hundred thousand, which means that for every morning, evening, or Sunday edition, there has been an average of seven hundred and fifty messages. The ordinary newspaper in a small town cannot afford such a service, but recently the United Press has originated a cooperative method. It telephones the news over one wire to ten or twelve newspapers at one time. In ten minutes a thousand words can in this way be flung out to a dozen towns, as quickly as by telegraph and much cheaper. But it is in a dangerous crisis, when safety seems to hang upon a second, that the telephone is at its best. It is the instrument of emergencies, a sort of ubiquitous watchman. When the girl operator in the exchange hears a cry for help--"Quick! The hospital!" "The fire department!" "The police!" she seldom waits to hear the number. She knows it. She is trained to save half-seconds. And it is at such moments, if ever, that the users of a telephone can appreciate its insurance value. No doubt, if a King Richard III were worsted on a modern battlefield, his instinctive cry would be, "My Kingdom for a telephone!"