They charge a fair price and make ten per cent profit for the State.

But they do not keep pace with the demand.

It is one of the oddest vagaries of public ownership that there is now in Tokio a WAITING LIST of eight thousand citizens, who are offering to pay for telephones and cannot get them.

And when a Tokian dies, his franchise to a telephone, if he has one, is usually itemized in his will as a four-hundred-dollar property.
India, which is second on the Asiatic list, has no more than nine thousand telephones--one to every thirty-three thousand of her population! Not quite so many, in fact, as there are in five of the skyscrapers of New York.

The Dutch East Indies and China have only seven thousand apiece, but in China there has recently come a forward movement.