The average time, for instance, taken to reply to a telephone call by a New York operator, is now three and two-fifth seconds; and even this tiny atom of time is being strenuously worn down.
As a witty Frenchman has said, one of our most lively regrets is that while we are at the telephone we cannot do business with our feet.

We regard it as a victory over the hostility of nature when we do an hour's work in a minute or a minute's work in a second.

Instead of saying, as the Spanish do, "Life is too short; what can one person do ?" an American is more apt to say, "Life is too short; therefore I must do to-day's work to-day." To pack a lifetime with energy--that is the American plan, and so to economize that energy as to get the largest results.

To get a question asked and answered in five minutes by means of an electric wire, instead of in two hours by the slow trudging of a messenger boy--that is the method that best suits our passion for instantaneous service.
It is one of the few social laws of which we are fairly sure, that a nation organizes in proportion to its velocity.

We know that a four-mile-an-hour nation must remain a huge inert mass of peasants and villagers; or if, after centuries of slow toil, it should pile up a great city, the city will sooner or later fall to pieces of its own weight.