Luxemburg 271 



talks reached the total of 922,692, scarcely 50 per cent. more. 

 This is a good traffic to develop within the area of one of the 

 smaller English counties and amongst a population, scarcely 

 equalling that of Edinburgh, chiefly employed in agriculture. It 

 bears out the opinion so often reiterated by the author that the 

 telephone possesses a sphere of usefulness all its own, which is at 

 present but little understood in the United Kingdom a sphere of 

 usefulness that it will fill without artificial fostering, as it were 

 spontaneously, whenever left to be introduced on its natural merits 

 and at its legitimate price. The different methods of treatment 

 pursued by the respective legislatures of the United Kingdom 

 and Luxemburg produce the result that in London, the greatest 

 commercial city in the world, there is about "14 of a telephone to 

 each hundred persons ; and in Luxemburg, one of the poorest 

 countries in Europe and possessed of no commercial importance 

 whatever, the ratio is "62. The British system would have been 

 simply prohibitive in such a country, just as it has proved to be 

 in many of the poorer British and Irish districts, which are to-day 

 as innocent of telephones as they were in the reigns of Caractacus 

 and Brian Boru. 



SERVICES RENDERED TO THE PUBLIC 



1. Intercourse between the subscribers to the same ex- 

 change. 



2. Intercourse between all the exchanges. Twenty of the 

 chief villages have direct wires to Luxemburg ; the remainder 

 communicate through an intermediate switch-room. 



3. Telephoning of telegrams. 



4. Telephoning of messages for local delivery or posting. 



5. Public telephone stations. There are some sixty-five of 

 these, which subscribers use without charge on producing a card 

 of identity. 



6. Calling non-subscribers to the public stations. This 

 facility is not confined as in other countries to the subscribers : 

 a non-subscriber may go to one public station and have a non- 

 subscribing client fetched to another. 



7. Parochial or communal stations. As in France and Swit- 

 zerland, a local authority wanting a telephone station where the 



