164 A SAGA OF THE SEAS 
“The world as yet does not know how much it owes to you, 
and this generation will never know it. I regard what has 
been done as the most marvellous thing in human history. 
I think it more marvellous than the invention of printing, 
or, I am almost ready to say, than the voyage of the Genoese.” 
This letter, written a few days after the Congressional elec- 
tion of 1866, concluded: ‘“‘Your elections have turned out 
well. I hope you will yet be ‘reconstructed’ on sound prin- 
ciples, and not on the unhappy doctrines of the President.” 
Apparently the courageous character of Andrew Johnson was 
not yet appreciated in England. 
A few weeks before this, Bright had said in a speech at 
Leeds: ‘Tomorrow is the greatest day in the United States, 
when perhaps millions of men will go to the polls, and they 
will give their votes on the great question whether justice 
shall or shall not be done to the liberated African. ... A 
friend of mine, Cyrus Field of New York, is the Columbus 
of our time, for after no less than forty passages across the 
Atlantic in pursuit of the great aim of his life, he has at length 
by his cable moved the New World close alongside the Old. 
. .. The English nations are brought together, and they 
must march on together.” 
In America, Field was once again the man of the hour, the 
hero of eulogistic celebrations, the man who everybody “knew 
would win.” A dinner was given in his honor by his old asso- 
ciates in the New York, Newfoundland & London Telegraph 
Company. The chairman of the Company, the well-beloved 
Peter Cooper, spoke of the Company’s origin twelve years 
before. 
He said in part: “We as little dreamed of the difficulties at 
that time that we were destined to encounter as did the Jews 
of old dream of the difficulties that they were doomed to meet 
in their passage to the promised land. We, like the Jews of 
old, saw the green hills afar off, and, like them, we had but a 
faint idea of the bare spots, the tangled thickets, and rugged 
