CHAPTER XVI
PENNY-A-WORD TELEGRAMS
FOR many years H. H. was engaged in endeavouring to secure the reduction of cable rates. In a letter addressed to the Postmaster-General, he wrote:
"At present the bulk of our trading negotiations are conducted in writing, just as they were between Assyria and Egypt thousands of years ago. There is a lamentable waste of time at every stage of the proceedings. We do business at a rate which might have been tolerable in patriarchal days, but which obviously leaves out of sight our slender span of life—seventy years. My property is m Australia. It takes me three months to write to that country and get a reply to my letter. This is too much out of my span of seventy years. Yet the human race for two generations has been in possession of means of instantaneous communication of thought, so perfect, so unerring, so docile, and so plentifully found in Nature that it would tax angelic intelligence to improve upon it. This means is, for all but the most urgent concerns, as utterly ignored and neglected as if we were living in the days of the Pharaohs. Even when it is employed, each country sets a new tax on the passing telegram, as it would upon luxuries or dangerous commodities. The flash of the message instantly passes over the face of Europe from one end to the other; yet it has to pay toll more than once on its way to the various foreign Governments. It seems to me it would be as reasonable to tax a sunbeam."
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