n spite of the fact that the few who did glimpse the great future
of the telegraph painted it in glowing terms.

It is true that the House of Representatives had passed the resolution
referred to earlier in this chapter, but that is as far as they went for
several years. On the 6th of April, 1838, Mr. F.O.J. Smith made a long
report on the petition of Morse asking for an appropriation sufficient to
enable him to test his invention adequately. In the course of this report
Mr. Smith indulged in the following eulogistic words:--

"It is obvious, however, that the influence of this invention over the
political, commercial, and social relations of the people of this widely
extended country, looking to nothing beyond, will, in the event of
success, of itself amount to a revolution unsurpassed in moral grandeur
by any discovery that has been made in the arts and sciences, from the
most distant period to which authentic history extends to the present
day. With the means of almost instantaneous communication of intelligence
between the most distant points of the country, and simultaneously
between any given number of intermediate points which this invention
contemplates, space will be, to all practical purposes of information,
completely annihilated between the States of the Union, as also between
the individual citizens thereof. The citizen will be invested with, and
reduce to daily and familiar use, an approach to the HIGH ATTRIBUTE OP
UBIQUITY in a degree that the human mind, until recently, has hardly
dared to contemplate seriously as belonging to human agency, from an
instinctive feeling of religious reverence and reserve on a power of such
awful grandeur."

In the face of these enthusiastic, if somewhat stilted, periods the
majority of his colleagues remained cold, and no appropriation was voted.
Morse, however, was prepared to meet with discouragements, for he wrote
to Vail on March 15:--

"Everything looks encouraging, but I need not say to you that in this
world a continued course of prosperity is not a rational expectation. We
shall, doubtless, find troubles and difficulties in store for us, and it
is the part of true wisdom to be prepared for whatever may await us. If
our hearts are right we shall not be taken by surprise. I see nothing now
but an unclouded prospect, for which let us pay to Him who shows it to us
the homage of grateful and obedient hearts, with most earnest prayers for
grace to use prosperity arigh