To the Editor of the Norta-Cara Dany News.
Sir,—I, would thank yor very much, and it would no doubt also give satisfaction to many of your readers. if you would allow me space for a few lines wherein to call the attention of the public to the defective state of the telephone service. During the last heavy rains it has been difficult to get anything except slow and sleepy replies from the 'Central' and beyond it no replies at all; ring and shout as you may. Surely it is time that subscribers could always and without fail communicate with one another, and that they.should not be obliged to trust to a favourable combination of fine weather and attentiveness on the part of the Company's servants to be able to do.so. It would of course necessitate a better attendance and a reconstruction of the Company's lines, which are at least ten years behind time. But, in consideration of the monopoly that they virtually hold and the golden harvest that they undoubtedly are reaping from it, long-suffering Shanghai has a right to demand that they should do something towards making the telephone the boon that it has proved to other places where it has been adopted, and they should not allow it to remain as it is at present an inexhaustible source of miscalculations and annoyance. If the Company will not heed such reasonable demands, subscribers should take the matter in hand themselves and form a company. If they were to do so and subscribe, as they do at present, fifty taels a year, they would at the end.of five' years from the time they started tind themselves the owners of an up-to-date exchange, having afterwards only to pay. for maintenance and attendance which would not exceed twenty taels a year. It is not, however, so much in the lowering; of the cost of subscription that they woul be the gainers, though it would induce: many to adopt it, as in the possession of perfect means of communication that would not be liable to interruptions of any kind, save actual breakage. My figures will probably startle some subscribers who, having read three months ago the local manager's touching appeal to the community against the introduction of tramways, would naturally have come to the conclusion that some kind people at home supplied our Model Settlement with a telephone service on the lines of pure philanthropy. Such is nevertheless not the case, the statement. as to cost that I have made is correct, and I hope the publishing of it will have the effect of rousing those benevolent people at home to the understanding that they cannot go on. humbugging the Shanghai. public much longer, but that it is now time they should supply what is so largely' paid for, an effective and reliable telephone service.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.