To compress it into a sentence, we might say that the telephone has completed the labor-saving movement which started with the McCormick reaper in 1831.

It has lifted the farmer above the wastefulness of being his own errand-boy.

The average length of haul from barn to market in the United States is nine and a half miles, so that every trip saved means an extra day's work for a man and team.

Instead of travelling back and forth, often to no purpose, the farmer may now stay at home and attend to his stock and his crops.
As yet, few farmers have learned to appreciate the value of quality in telephone service, as they have in other lines.

The same man who will pay six prices for the best seed-corn, and who will allow nothing but high-grade cattle in his barn, will at the same time be content with the shabbiest and flimsiest telephone service, without offering any other excuse than that it is cheap.