It is of course not hereby intended to imply that these modern inventions meet no wants but such as they themselves create. It is beyond dispute that such mechanical contrivances, for instance, as the telephone, the typewriter, and the automobile are not only great and creditable technological achievements, but they are also of substantial service. At the same time it is at least doubtful if these inventions have not wasted more effort and substance than they have saved,--that they are to be credited with an appreciable net loss. They are designed to facilitate travel and communication, and such is doubtless their first and obvious effect. But the net result of their introduction need by no means be the same. Their chief use is in the service of business, not of industry, and their great further use is in the furtherance, or rather the acceleration, of obligatory social amenities. As contrivances for the expedition of traffic both in business and in social intercourse their use is chiefly, almost wholly, of a competitive nature; and in the competitive equipment and manœuvres of business and of gentility the same broad principle will be found to apply as applies to competitive armaments and improvements in the technology of warfare. Any technological advantage gained by one competitor forthwith becomes a necessity to all the rest, on pain of defeat. The typewriter is, no doubt, a good and serviceable contrivance for the expedition of a voluminous correspondence, but there is also no reasonable doubt but its introduction has appreciably more than doubled the volume of correspondence necessary to carry on a given volume of business, or that it has quadrupled the necessary cost of such correspondence. And the expedition of correspondence by stenographer and typewriter has at the same time become obligatory on all business firms, on pain of losing caste and so of losing the confidence of their correspondents. Of the telephone much the same is to be said, with the addition that its use involves a very appreciable nervous strain and its ubiquitous presence conduces to an unremitting nervous tension and unrest wherever it goes. The largest secure result of these various modern contrivances designed to facilitate and abridge travel and communication appears to be an increase of the volume of traffic per unit of outcome, acceleration of the pace and heightening of the tension at which the traffic is carried on, and a consequent increase of nervous disorders and shortening of the effective working life of those engaged in this traffic. But in these matters invention is the mother of necessity, and within the scope of these contrivances for facilitating and abridging labour there is no alternative, and life is not offered on any other terms.[142]