The whole country was ablaze with a passion of prosperity.

After generations of conflict, the men with large ideas had at last put to rout the men of small ideas.

The waste and folly of competition had everywhere driven men to the policy of cooperation.

Mills were linked to mills and factories to factories, in a vast mutualism of industry such as no other age, perhaps, has ever known.

And as the telephone is essentially the instrument of co-working and interdependent people, it found itself suddenly welcomed as the most popular and indispensable of all the agencies that put men in touch with each other.
To describe this growth in a single sentence, we might say that the Bell telephone secured its first million of capital in 1879; its first million of earnings in 1882; its first million of dividends in 1884; its first million of surplus in 1885.