148 NINTH ANNUAL REPORT OF 



of co-operation between those States. A languid life existed ; a weak 

 Confederacy in the outset was formed, proportioned to their outward 

 means of communication and organization. A few centuries earlier 

 than this, before navigation and other arts of locomotion had made 

 much progress, each settlement on the coast would have been the 

 centre of a small jurisdiction, with still less power of co-operation or 

 union with its neighbors; science would have slept; events would have 

 been slow ; the human mind, for the most part, stagnant; civilization in 

 abeyance; man isolated in industry and social sympathy from his fellow 

 man. 



At the time of the formation of the American Constitution our fathers 

 looked with anxiety at what seemed to them an immense territory, 

 though now but a small fraction of this republic, and asked if veins and 

 arteries could ever ramify through this body politic, and interfuse the 

 whole system with a common lite-blood. To increase the difficulty 

 and danger, new territory was added, new States in the interior of the 

 country came in ; but, at the same time, the genius of civilization and 

 the providence of God gave to us the realization of the dream of the 

 poet in the invention of the steamboat. A new means of relating men 

 to each other, of combining their industry, of introducing the era of peace 

 and good will upon earth, was discovered. Wherever the great rivers 

 penetrated the heart of the continent, there quick communication could 

 be had with the centres of government, industry, and commerce 

 throughout the land. 



A tew years later, and our population, with the instinct 5f freedom, 

 spread still further over the prairies and into the wilderness. The na- 

 tion was again outgrowing its means of intercommunication and com- 

 mon life, when the railroad and steam-car were invented, and again the 

 continuance of the commonwealth became possible ; the confederated 

 republic had a new lease of lite by virtue of the application of science 

 to civilization. 



Still later our empire spread to the Pacific and stretched three thou- 

 sand miles across the American continent. Different oceans washed its 

 two shores. Our faces on the Atlantic coast were turned eastward, 

 our brothers on the Pacific looked westward, and the Rocky mountains 

 rose between. By steamboat or railroad, weeks must now intervene in 

 the communication between distant parts of this mighty organization of 

 confederated municipalities and States. The veins and arteries were 

 provided, but the living nation had yet no nervous S3^stem to flash com- 

 munication firom one part to another, and to combine the whole into an 

 organized body, which might, in its capacity for future expansion, 

 include the whole race, and inhabit the whole earth. Before this 

 time of need had fully arrived, the electric telegraph received its most 

 important development, and was introduced into America. 



The electric telegraph is thus the nervous system of this nation and 

 of modern society, by no figure of speech, by no distant analogy. Its 

 vv'ires spread like nerves over the surface of the land, interlinking dis- 

 tant parts, and making possible a perpetually higher co-operation 

 among men, and higher social forms than have hitherto existed. By 

 means of its Ufe-hke functions the social body becomes a living whole, 

 and each of its new applications marks a step in the organization of hu- 

 man life. 



