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.