• BACK TO THE LAND—AND THE TELEPHONE.
TIALF in jest, and half, perhaps, in remembrance of the late Lord Salisbury's " circus in every village," Mr. Rider Haggard has proposed a new remedy for rural depopu- lation. He was speaking on Monday at the first annual meeting of the Co-operative Small Holdings Society, and referred to his recent visit to the United States as Govern- ment Commissioner sent to report on the Salvation Army colonies. During that visit he was informed by Mr. Wilson, the Secretary of State for Agriculture, that in several districts they had actually succeeded in stopping the exodus from the country into the towns,—an exodus which was puzzling Americans as well as Englishmen. They had solved the difficulty, and kept the men on the land, by fixing up a tele- phone in every house. The women no longer sighed for the amusements of the town; after their work was done they gossiped to each other over the telephone. Mr. Haggard threw out the suggestion that, in order to make village life more attractive, the American example might well be copied in England.
Attractions may be wanted to keep men and women in the villages, but would the " telephone in every cottage" prove attractive to the villager mind ? Not at once, certainly, for movements are slower in the villages than in the towns, and in London and the great towns it is not every one who is yet impressed with the delights of possessing a telephone. To some minds, of course, the telephone has already become an absolute necessity. Deprived of it they are as helpless as a
carpenter without hands. The idea of writing a series' of letters with a pen and ink, directing, sealing, and stamping the envelopes, and then waiting till the day after to-morrow for an answer simply paralyses them ; even the reply-paid telegram has become for them hopelessly cumbersome and old-fashioned. Their only notion is to get through theit necessary business communications in the least possible tithe, and with the smallest expenditure of trouble ; though, even so, the telephone cannot do everything for them, for the day has not yet arrived when you can speak money into or out of your bank,—the bankers still want signatures that can be read. But it is not only for business purposes that the telephone is used habitually. Some of the most ardent advocates of the spoken rather than the written word are women, and very naturally so. Nobody but the woman who has actually managed a large household, or for that matter a small one, knows how fatally easy it is to get to the end of a day and to find, on looking back, that " there has been no time " to do anything solid, or to "get at" some particular piece of work which has foqplong needed finishing. The whole day has been spent in a ceaseless round of small interruptions and petty excursions, yet it is difficult to see, on reviewing the day, how the interruptions could have been prevented or the time saved. Enter to her, pondering on these matters, the vision of telephonic communication with shops and friends. There will be no more need to make appointments by letter with the dressmaker, or to drive to the box-office of the theatre to take tickets, or to be kept waiting for forty- eight hours before she knows whether Mrs. Blank can meet her or come to tea. Nor is there any reason why the instrument should be restricted to what are more or less business communications. To do the thing properly you will have a telephone installed in your bedroom, so that the first thing in the morning you can ring up all your friends who can bear it. And, indeed, a telephone in the bedroom may be, in exceptional cases, a real and wonder- ful boon. You can always cut off communication if you want to be left alone, though it needs considerable strength of mind to contemplate a disconnected instrument for hours together, and to know that there may be friend after friend vainly trying to ring you up to tell you the most exciting and really important news. But to understand how great a blessing the bedroom telephone may be, you must be suddenly struck down with an infectious disease, so that nobody will come near you. If you can contrive to contract, say, a slight and not dangerous attack of an easily taken illness like measles, the amusement and consolation you can get by perpetually ringing and being rung up is hardly to be estimated. The conclusion of your illness leaves you with a debt of gratitude to the inventor of the telephone which it would be difficult to repay.
In contrast to the woman who has a genuine affection for her telephone, there is a smaller class of men and women, with men, perhaps, in the majority, to whom, it is symbolic of all that is newest and worst of modern hurry and bustle and intrusion upon private amenities of peace and quiet. To such people the telephone is a subject that cannot be mentioned in even tones. The message conveyed to them that " Mr. B. wants you on the telephone," or, more often, "Mr. B. wants to see you at the telephone," is received with almost in- articulate expressions of fury. " What does he want ? Who is Mr. B. ? Why can't he write ? What does he mean by having the cheek to say ' he wants me on the telephone' ? Why should I leave what I am doing, in which I simply must not be interrupted, to go and answer some wretched, petty little question which he ought to put in writing if it ia really. important ?" The worst of it is that such sum- monses nearly always do succeed in attracting the sum- moned one to the receiver. There may, just possibly, be something urgent in what Mr. B. has to say, though it hardly ever happens that there is; but it is this feeling that a chance may be being neglected which is the compelling magnet. Mr. B., having assured his reluctant interlocutor that he hoped he had not interrupted him, but was just going to sit down and write to him when it occurred to him it would save time to ring him up, and would he be at home on Sunday, his victim returns to his work. Is it unreasonable of him to detest the new force which bustles him out of his orderly habits and precise, slow-going industry ? It may be natural to loathe the ring of the bell, but ought he not to recognise that unless he accommodates himself to the quicker pace at which the others are thinialig and working, he will be left behind? And if it is no longer possible to succeed in businesi without making use of the new force, is it not con- ceivable that even the balance of private or social life may be upset into the bargain ? There may be imagined a time when it Will be " no use trying to know the So-and-sos, because they aren't on the 'phone." That last and direst of abbrevia- tions has not yet &rally and absolutely "arrived," but it is arriving.
Of course, if all that happens, and if the telephone as a means of social intercommunication is decided to be not only valuable, but compulsory, the movement in favour of its adoption will inevitably sprpad from the towns to the villages. If, in the faster life which is coming, a person is to be regarded as socially deaf and dumb who refuses to be per- petually at the disposal of any one who wants to talk to him, it will become after a time just as unfashionable to be deaf and dumb in the country as in London. Young John Half- acre, leaving his father's farm at Brampton-among-the-Roses for a week's visit to Cousin Tom, who has a draper's shop in the neighbouring Assizes town, will be attracted to town life not so much by the shops and the glitter as by the easy conversation at the receiver in the back parlour ; he will be fascinated by the joy of being able to ring up his cousin Mabel, or perhaps Mabel's friend, who is in service in another town a dozen miles away. It may even happen that a new method of rustic courtship may thus be added to the three stages already existing, and known as " walking-out," "courting," and being " engaged." It will be perhaps described as " talking." " No, they wasn't engaged, and they didn't walk out, but they used to talk of an evening," will be the explanation given of the behaviour of Mabel and John, though, indeed, as the conversation of ,loving couples " walking out" is believed to consist mainly of impressive silences, conversations " on the wire " might possibly be a
little monotonous. " 'Ullo I Are you there ? . . . .
Yes, I'm 'ere What say ?.. . . I'm 'ere, I say. . . . . No, I didn't say nothing. . . ." Still, even if he does say nothing, it will be attractive to think that he could do so, if he had anything to say. He will return to the farm, and will grumble aftst supper that in such a dead-alive' place it is impossible to talk to anybody. His father,• realising that the new invention allows him to discover what price So-and-so is asking for his horse, or how the jury "brought it in" at the Assizes, without riding over to the town or buying a newspaper, eventually inquires the price of an installation in his back parlour, or asks the parson to get the Parish Council to instal an instrument in the village Institute. From the bagatelle-room at the Institute to the draper's and the baker's and the butcher's is only a natural progress, and after that there would be little more to be done to make village life in the country as bright and busy and up-to-date as in the towns. There would be no need, indeed, to live in town at all; unless, per- chance, some energetic propagandist were to arise, with a self- imposed mission to make town life more attractive by cutting
off town people from the telephone. •
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