NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 103 



business rendered it necessary to add new energy to our means of 

 communication. Is it too much to suppose that the demands of 

 business may, before a long time, lead to the establishment of tele- 

 graphic communications* between our principal cities 1 Twelve years 

 ago it was stated in the French papers that three thousand messages 

 could be conveyed in one day from Paris to any extremity of France, 

 and that answers could be received to them. Even since I have been 

 preparing to meet you at this time, the question has been agitated as 

 to the practicability of a telegraphic line for purposes of business 

 between the great seat of our northern manufactures and this city. 

 And why may we not look forward to the time when there shall be 

 such a communication between this city and New York, Philadelphia, 

 and Washington ? I dare not presume to predict such an event for 

 some time to come ; and yet when we daily witness the extraordinary 

 resources of this growing country when we observe the wonderful 

 results of an active and intelligent population incessantly occupied in 

 developing their powers and resources and stimulated, by the cir- 

 cumstances in which they are placed, to greater and more intense 

 exertion than the same number of people have probably ever been 

 when we see, too, that all ordinary calculations, founded upon the 

 precedents of other nations, fall short of what is here actually accom- 

 plished when we witness all this, we cannot believe that it is being 

 too sanguine to expect the application of the telegraph to a vastly 

 greater extent than we have yet seen. Will it be said that the de- 

 mands of business will never be such as to warrant the adoption of it, 

 for instance, between this city and New York ? For want of practical 

 knowledge, I dare not affirm that this will very soon be the case ; and 

 yet if there are now essential advantages to business in obtaining 

 intelligence from New York in two days, or less, or at the rate of eight 

 or ten miles an hour, any man can perceive that there may be a pro- 

 portionate benefit, when we can transmit the same information for 

 that distance, by telegraph, at the rate of four miles in a minute, or 

 in the space of a single hour from New York to Boston. Let us take 

 as an example, by way of illustrating this view of the subject, the case 

 of the great question now agitated at Washington, and in which the 

 welfare of the country is so essentially involved. Might it not_ prove 

 to be of vital importance to thousands of our men of business, in this 

 quarter of the Union, whether friendly or adverse to the tariff, to be 

 able to know the decision of the government at Washington, in two 

 hours and a quarter after that decision was made ? Why do we 

 annually see such extraordinary efforts made to transmit the message 

 of the chief magistrate, and other state papers and public acts of gov- 

 ernment, through all parts of the country ? When, therefore, we find 

 by actual experience that this rapid mode of communication is deemed 

 necessary to the wants of an active community, who will venture to set 

 bounds to its application? We can, in imagination, suppose it to be 

 extended on our coast from one end of the continent to the other ; and 



r Mr. Pickering here refers to the old form of telegraph by which intelligence is commu- 

 nicated from station to station by means of signals. 



