"What strikes and frightens the backward European as much as anything in
the United States is the efficiency and fearful universality of the
telephone. Just as I think of the big cities as agglomerations pierced
everywhere by elevator-shafts full of movement, so I think of them as
being threaded, under pavements and over roofs and between floors and
ceilings and between walls, by millions upon millions of live filaments
that unite all the privacies of the organism--and destroy them in order
to make one immense publicity! I do not mean that Europe has failed to
adopt the telephone, nor that in Europe there are no hotels with the
dreadful curse of an active telephone in every room. But I do mean that
the European telephone is a toy, and a somewhat clumsy one, compared
with the inexorable seriousness of the American telephone. Many
otherwise highly civilized Europeans are as timid in addressing a
telephone as they would be in addressing a royal sovereign. The average
European middle-class householder still speaks of his telephone, if he
has one, in the same falsely casual tone as the corresponding American
is liable to speak of his motor-car. It is naught--a negligible
trifle--but somehow it comes into the conversation!

"How odd!" you exclaim. And you are right. It is we Europeans who are
wrong, through no particular fault of our own.

The American is ruthlessly logical about the telephone. The only
occasion on which I was in really serious danger of being taken for a
madman in the United States was when, in a Chicago hotel, I permanently
removed the receiver from the telephone in a room designed (doubtless
ironically) for slumber. The whole hotel was appalled. Half Chicago
shuddered. In response to the prayer of a deputation from the management