The lesson of thirty years' experience shows that a private telephone company is apt to be much more obedient to the will of the people than if it were a Government department.

But it is an axiom of democracy that no company, however well conducted, will be permitted to control a public convenience without being held strictly responsible for its own acts.

As politics becomes less of a game and more of a responsibility, the telephone of the future will doubtless be supervised by some sort of public committee, which will have power to pass upon complaints, and to prevent the nuisance of duplication and the swindle of watering stock.
As this Federal supervision becomes more and more efficient, the present fear of monopoly will decrease, just as it did in the case of the railways.

It is a fact, although now generally forgotten, that the first railways of the United States were run for ten years or more on an anti-monopoly plan.

The tracks were free to all.