302 Cooperation in Agriculture 



Negotiations would therefore be opened with the telephone 

 company operating in the nearest town, the town with 

 .which these farmers did their usual trading, for a contract 

 by which the farmers could secure town service and also 

 get access to the toll lines reaching to the county seat and 

 the metropolitan center of the district. These contracts 

 between the groups of farmers and the larger systems 

 operating in the cities and connecting with the long-dis- 

 tance toll lines made these farmers' groups or mutual 

 companies, as many of them were called, a part of a larger 

 system sometimes the Bell, sometimes the independent 

 and marked the first step toward attaining the ultimate 

 end of telephone service, which is to enable every one who 

 has access to a telephone to reach every other person who 

 can reach one. 



"The connection with the more important systems in a 

 way furnished all the telephone service needed for the 

 second period of development, but a third step had to 

 follow. In many cases, as these little mutual farmers' 

 lines took on more subscribers and extended from farm to 

 farm, they began to overlap one another in the territory 

 served, a fact which in the natural sequence of events led 

 to the consolidation of these lines and the formation of 

 larger systems. As a result of this process of consolida- 

 tion the purely mutual character of the ownership became 

 weaker. In order to secure a proper maintenance of the 

 lines and those uniform methods of operation and construc- 

 tion which are essential to good service, it was found nec- 

 essary for their ownership to take the corporate form ; 

 and to-day a very large number of incorporated telephone 

 companies exist in the United States controlled by a regu- 



