As for organized systems of intercommunication, they were unknown even under the rule of a Pericles or a Caesar. There was no post office in Great Britain until 1656--a generation after America had begun to be colonized. There was no English mail-coach until 1784; and when Benjamin Franklin was Postmaster General at Philadelphia, an answer by mail from Boston, when all went well, required not less than three weeks. There was not even a hard-surface road in the thirteen United States until 1794; nor even a postage stamp until 1847, the year in which Alexander Graham Bell was born. In this same year Henry Clay delivered his memorable speech on the Mexican War, at Lexington, Kentucky, and it was telegraphed to The New York Herald at a cost of five hundred dollars, thus breaking all previous records for news-gathering enterprise. Eleven years later the first cable established an instantaneous sign-language between Americans and Europeans; and in 1876 there came the perfect distance-talking of the telephone. No invention has been more timely than the telephone. It arrived at the exact period when it was needed for the organization of great cities and the unification of nations. The new ideas and energies of science, commerce, and cooperation were beginning to win victories in all parts of the earth. The first railroad had just arrived in China; the first parliament in Japan; the first constitution in Spain. Stanley was moving like a tiny point of light through the heart of the Dark Continent. The Universal Postal Union had been organized in a little hall in Berne. The Red Cross movement was twelve years old. An International Congress of Hygiene was being held at Brussells, and an International Congress of Medicine at Philadelphia. De Lesseps had finished the Suez Canal and was examining Panama. Italy and Germany had recently been built into nations; France had finally swept aside the Empire and the Commune and established the Republic. And what with the new agencies of railroads, steamships, cheap newspapers, cables, and telegraphs, the civilized races of mankind had begun to be knit together into a practical consolidation.