VI. DENMARK 



HISTORY AND PRESENT POSITION 



Ix Denmark, as in Holland and Norway, and at first in Sweden, 

 telephonic development has been left in the hands of conces- 

 sionary companies and individuals, and to an even greater extent, 

 for it is only within the last two years that the Government 

 Telegraph Department has taken any part, directly or otherwise, 

 in telephone exchange work. The plan has been for munici- 

 palities and other local authorities to grant licences for the areas 

 under their control, and exchanges have been thereupon esta- 

 blished, usually with locally-subscribed capital. This system, open 

 as it doubtless is to the reproach of want of uniformity and 

 homogeneity, has had, wherever brought into use, a most bene- 

 ficial effect in stimulating telephonic development and in bringing 

 the new mode of communication within the reach of the masses. 

 It has placed Holland and the three Scandinavian countries 

 telephonically far in advance of Great Britain, where the alterna- 

 tive of doing without telephones at all is apparently preferred to 

 allowing the people any opportunity of acting for themselves, or 

 of breaking loose from the fetters forged, in the name of public 

 policy, by the Post Office. In Denmark, as a consequence, a 

 country not much larger than some of our English counties, there 

 exist and flourish that is to say, are worked at a profit some sixty- 

 six telephone exchanges, which means that not only every town, 

 but almost every townlet and village in the country, possesses one. 

 Copenhagen, the capital, a city with a population rather exceeding 

 that of Islington, boasts (November 1894) of 4,510 instruments in 

 connection with its exchange, and outside Copenhagen, in the same 



