Taking the United States as a whole, there are to-day fully two hundred and fifty thousand people who are paying for two telephones instead of one, an economic waste of at least ten million dollars a year.
A fair-minded survey of the entire independent telephone movement would probably show that it was at first a stimulant, followed, as stimulants usually are, by a reaction.

It was unquestionably for several years a spur to the Bell Companies.

But it did not fulfil its promises of cheap rates, better service, and high dividends; it did little or nothing to improve telephonic apparatus, producing nothing new except the automatic switchboard--a brilliant invention, which is now in its experimental period.

In the main, perhaps, it has been a reactionary and troublesome movement in the cities, and a progressive movement among the farmers.
By 1907 it was a wave that had spent its force.

It was no longer rolling along easily on the broad ocean of hope, but broken and turned aside by the rocks of actual conditions.