THE TELEPHONE DEBATE.
MONDAY night's debate in the House of COmmons illustrated what we take to be the undoubted fact, that while the agitation in the Metropolitan area against the agreement between the Post Office end the National Telephone Company may possibly be wide, it is not deep. Mr. Burns, it is true, had something to say as to the desirability of including the police-stations, the firemen, the ambulances, and the labour bureaux in any completely satisfactory telephone system. We fully agree; but it is a crying disgrace to the authorities respectively responsible if all police-stations, fire-engine stations, and ambulance stations are not already connected with the telephone exchanges when that has been possible for £20 a year, or for £17 if a five years' contract were taken ; and we see no reason to suppose that a reduction of £S, or £8, or even £10 in the subscription required would make the difference in such parsimonious eyes. Nor can it be readily imagined that in the expenses of a labour bureau once started, whether by enlightened private benevolence or Trade-Union co-operation, such a difference would be allowed to weigh seriously against the obvious advantages of being on the telephone. As to the doctors, to whose case Sir Walter Foster, as well as Mr. Burns, referred, cer- tainly the more of them there are on the telephone exchanges the better. But in respect of the great majority of them connection with the telephone system, which under the agreement, as we understand, cannot cost above £17, with the right of unlimited use, secures professional advantages of such unquestionable value that it cannot seriously be maintained that it is a hardship for them to pay for it; while in the case of young medical officers of hospitals, who, according to Sir W. Foster, are required to have their houses telephonically connected, so that they can be called up in case of emergency, that is obviously a legitimate hospital expense. For the rest, the question of the annual charges for the unlimited use of the telephone —called, accordmg to an ugly new commercial jargon, " flat-rates "—is altogether without any direct, if even it has any indirect, interest to the masses of the people.
We do not mean to say that there may not be an appreciable number of prosperous artisan households in which the introduction of the telephone might be reason- ably contemplated as an agreeable addition, like a piano- forte, to the interests and diversions of life, and in which a few pounds more or less in the annual hire of the one luxury, as of the other, might turn the balance for or against it. But precisely in so far as there could be any question of the use of the telephone by people who are living by the labour of their hands, or by tradespeople in a small way of business, the agreement between the Pest Office and the National Telephone Company offers advantages which it may seem convenient, but is perfectly futile, for advanced and rather aerbzumimis politicians, like Mr. Lough, to ignore. In the clear and interesting speech in which he vindicated the action of the Government in regard to the agreement, Mr. Austen Chamberlain laid stress on this point, and Mr Hanbury, speaking later, also emphasised it, in comparison with the scheme which, was put forward by the County Council, and which the Government have been severely reproached. for not having allowed that body to proceed with. 'A little detail seems desirable here. As our readers are probably aware: the agreement fixes, up to 1905, the charges to be made by the National Telephone Company and the Post Office for telephene services. They are the same for both agencies. In the annual rate for unlimited service there has, it is admitted, been but a slight reduction, at rate compared with the hopes which had been ex- tensively oherished. The Company has hitherto charged 420 a year, except when there was a contract for five years, when the annual rate was reduced to .217, and the only improvement made there by the agreement is that nobody shall pay more than £17. There is a serious gap between that figure and 410 a year, which was the rate at which the London County Council declared itself ready to supply an unlimited service. But then the County Council proposed that, and nothing else. The Company and the Post Office, on the other hand, under their agreement, over to any individual subscriber in the county of London connection with the whole telephone system of that county for £5, with a toll of one penny a message, and a minimum annual charge for messages of .21 10s.,—which mpana £6 10s. for, practically, an average of one call a day. That, surely, is an im- portant step towards the popularisation of the telephone, and it is tarried even farther by the regulations with regard to " party lines," under which, as we understand, a line can be shared by from two to ten neighbours at a rate which would work out at no more than £5 per annum to each, if he sent two messages a day within the radius of the exchange concerned, or one a day to any other part of the London area. We do not, personally, anticipate that these arrangements will be made use of at all ex- tensively by the working classes, but in that view we may be wrong, and in any case it is unquestionable that the agreement under which these facilities are offered has been framed from a far more democratic, or less plutocratic, point of view than the single proposal of an annual charge even so low as £10 for an unlimited use of the telephone, which was made by the County Council. Moreover, it is important to bear in mind that, as Mr. Austen Chamberlain plainly indicated, there is an interdependence between the different scales of charges contained in the agreement for which the Post Office is responsible. The " flat-rate " is for the well-to-do ; the " toll-rate " is for those who have to think of their pennies ; and if the former were lowered to the kind of figure pro- posed by the County Council the latter would have to disappear, the rich gaining, no doubt, but at the expense of the poor, from whom telephonic facilities would be withheld, unless the taxpayer were to be mulcted. - Such, at any rate, is the Government's view of the case, and Mr. Hanbury offered it as a " clear-cut issue" to the House. We see no pristaVasie ground for assuming that it is an unfair presentation. Nor can we be surprised, or son-y, that the Lord Mayor, who had moved the amendment to the Address, which was ram- pantly, seconded by Mr. Lough, in favour of an inquiry into the working of the new agreement before proceeding further with it, wished to withdraw it, and did not vote for it. This was in view of the assurance from Mr. A. Chamberlain that an inquiry would be made before 1905, and that the charges now laid down are regarded as experimental. A few other Unionist Members for Metropolitan constituencies also abstained, and two or three Ministetialists voted against the Government. One of these was Mr. Cross, a Liberal Unionist Member for one of the divisions of Glasgow. It is not unnatural that he should associate himself with the disappointment which, as we have recognised, is widely felt in London at the absence of any considerable reduction of the rates for unlimited use of the telephone under the agreement into which the Post Office has entered. In Glasgow the Cor- poration, under the Act of 1899, which conferred large freedom of establishing competition with the National Telephone Company in provincial centres, while leaving the case of London- to be separately dealt .with„ has gone very far indeed in that competition. It has set up a municipal telephone service which offers an unlimited use for only £5 5s. per annum, with, alternatively, a .charge of £3 10$. a year, and one penny for each call. This compares with a charge of. £10 for unlimited service, and no " toil-rate," on the part of the National Telephone Company in the same city. As might be sup- posed, there has been a very brisk demand fur the privileges thus offered, and it is said to be anticipated by those concerned that the financial results will be very satisfactory. Those who think this cheerful view justified naturally look upon the agreement between the Post Office and the National Company, for the London area, as marked either by flagrant want of enterprise or excessive considera- tion for the interests of the Company, or by both those vices. But the cheerful view is not universally held in Glasgow. One of the most influential Scottish paper*, the Glasgow Herald, in its comments on Monday night's debate has hardly any doubt that Lord Londonderry and his colleagues have been right in pursuing the opposite course to that adopted by the Glasgow Corporation. " Glasgow," we are told, "has entered upon a purely speculative . enterprise; low user rates have been granted to the subscribers to the Corporation system, but there is no guarantee that these rates will pay the speculator. Meantime there is no inter- communication between the two systems (the Corporation's and the National Telephone Company's), and a number of people are compelled to subscribe to both." Reading this, we are the less inclined to desire that the Post Office had made or 'sanctioned the plunge to low rates for unlimited use of the telephone which the County Council desired, and so many people of both parties seem to have wished that we could yet make. Mr. Austen Chamberlain is plainly right in his contention that the telephone business lends itself, where one system has been fully established, singularly ill to ordinary competition. The National Tele- phone Company has got some forty thousand subscribers in the London area, and the Post Office, if it had flung itself into a headlong competition with the Company, would have had to offer to its early subscribers only the chance of telephon4 conversation with a few hundreds. It might have won away a large proportion of the subscribers of the Company by offering facilities at a much lower rate, but again, it might not ; and in any case it would have had to face the fiet that, as Mr. Austen Chamberlain states, the conditions Of the telephone business over a wide area are such that a largely increased number of customers does not mean at in • rate of profit, but rather the reverse. Supposing there had been loss, it would have been very difficult, it not impossible, for the Post Office to raise its rates, and yet the only other way of making up for a deficiency would have been out of the pocket of the general taxpayer. Very possibly there is a just mean somewhere between the magnificent audacity of the Glasgow Corporation and the entire avoidance of risks which has commended itself to the Post Office. Very possibly, as we can imagine, insist- ence on a £12 or £14 rate for unlimited use of the tele- phone might have secured the acquiescence of the Com- pany, and might yet have allowed of the " toll-rates " for the small people, and all without undue risk of loss. But, on the whole, the Post Office have erred, if they have erred, on the right side as a Government Department. They have unquestionably used their power to bring about important, and democratic, improvements as compared with the unqualified monopoly of the Company, and the inquiry to be held within three years will give the oppor. tunity for a further extension of telephonic facilities, if it would be economically justifiable.
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