The isolation of the individual life is virtually obliterated by such an agency.  Solitude disappears before it; for he whose ear is within hearing of his instrument, knows not at what moment any one of many thousands of people may speak to him.  He knows not at what moment intelligence of an ever-varying kind may be spoken to him from his own community or out of the depths of distance.  The mind is thus affiliated with an enlarged and ever-present society.  These considerations do not relate to mere matters of convenience and quickness and advantage and safety, but to the larger question of the aggregate effect upon the individual.

The effect on the community is of like kind.  The community is no longer so segregated as it was before.  The community is in touch with other communities of like character.  The conflagration in one town is felt in the neighboring towns, if it is not seen.  The epidemic of the one is the epidemic of many.  The sensation of the one community diffuses itself instantly into several.  The effect is in the intellectual life like that of a wave produced on the lake by the casting in of a stone.  The wave widens and recedes.  It may be obstructed or unobstructed in its progress.  If obstructed, the obstructions may be removed.  Then the motion of the wave will become free and regular.  So also on the tide of public thought.  The telephone is an agency for removing mental obstructions, and for the regular diffusion of a common thought.

All this, however, is attended with draw-backs.  One of these is the breaking in on the privacy and seclusion of the individual life.  Individuality suffers under scientific progress.  Great thinking is accomplished best in solitude.  Emerson has forcibly pointed out the advantages which arise in the intellectual life from its isolation and seclusion—­from its free and uninterrupted communion with itself.

The convenience—­the physical convenience—­of life is vastly augmented by such a contrivance as the telephone.  Time is saved and trouble obviated.  But at the same time the necessity for bodily exercise is reduced, and the overgrowth of brain at the expense of body encouraged.  The fact is that the invention of the telephone and its general use, while it has added very greatly to the comfort of life, while it has promoted ease and diffused a social sense that needed stimulation and development, has at the same time brought in conditions that are not wholly favorable to human welfare.  More largely still, the truth is that the telephone, like every other symbol and agency of progress, has brought enlarged responsibilities.

No man, no community, no people or nation can gain an increase of power without accepting the accompanying increase of responsibility.  The moral nature of man is thus involved.  Every forward stride of scientific invention places upon the life of man, including his bodily activity, his mental moods and his spiritual and moral powers, an added stress of duty, of energy, and of rectitude in conduct from which he may not shrink if he would be the gainer rather than the loser.  Each discovery and each improved method of employing the beneficent forces of the natural world, brings with it a strain upon the moral nature of man which, if he stand it, well; but if he stand it not, then it shall go ill with him.