"water"; but so greatly has its business grown and so capably has
it been managed that all this liquid material has since been
converted into more solid substance. The disappearance of Andrew
Carnegie and his coworkers and the emergence of this gigantic
enterprise completed the great business cycle in the steel trade.
The age of individual enterprise and competition had passed--that
of corporate control had arrived.



CHAPTER IV. THE TELEPHONE: "AMERICA'S MOST POETICAL ACHIEVEMENT"

A distinguished English journalist, who was visiting the United
States, in 1917, on an important governmental mission, had an
almost sublime illustration of the extent to which the telephone
had developed on the North American Continent. Sitting at a desk
in a large office building in New York, Lord Northcliffe took up
two telephone receivers and placed one at each ear. In the first
he heard the surf beating at Coney Island, New York, and in the
other he heard, with equal distinctness, the breakers pounding
the beach at the Golden Gate, San Francisco. Certainly this
demonstration justified the statement made a few years before by
another English traveler. "What startles and frightens the
backward European in the United States," said Mr. Arnold Bennett,
"is the efficiency and fearful universality of the telephone. To
me it was the proudest achievement and the most poetical
achievement of the American people."

Lord Northcliffe's experience had a certain dramatic justice
which probably even he did not appreciate. He is the proprietor