HONORS AND REWARDS 174 
New York, October 1, 1867. 
My dear Mr. Deane,—In relation to the tariff, and particularly 
that part touching ciphers, I must again appeal to you, and I do 
wish my words could carry conviction to your mind of the fatal 
tendency of the course we are carried into by your rules. . . . 
But let us inquire if we are benefited by this rule of strictness. 
We see that very few acknowledged cipher messages are for- 
warded. ‘There are people who can make messages apparently in 
plain text but which are actually cipher, and in the various at- 
tempts to get much into little there lies the germ of many dis- 
putes between customers and receiving clerks. ‘The truth is, we 
make nothing and lose much. Many who were our best custom- 
ers now use the line only in cases of emergency, whereas they 
would use it daily if our terms were liberal. The U. S. govern- 
ment and the representatives at Washington of all the foreign 
governments are determined to use us as little as possible. We 
are reviled on every side. ‘The government, the press, and all the 
people will do all in their power to encourage a competing line. 
Something must be done to arrest this feeling. Why not try re- 
duction for three months, and see what the effect will be. . . . 
I remain, my dear Mr. Deane, 
Very truly your friend, 
Cyrus W. Field. 
Eventually Field’s policy was adopted, and the pompous 
British officiousness was curbed. After the success of these 
two pioneer cables, completed after so much hard labor and 
worry, other cables were laid across the Atlantic. ‘Three years 
later, for example, France was connected to America by a 
line to the little island of St. Pierre just south of Newfound- 
land, and thence to the mainland by a shorter cable. ‘This 
was laid by the Great Eastern with some of the same staff as in 
1866. This line from Brest to St. Pierre was nearly twenty- 
seven hundred nautical miles—considerably longer than 
the Newfoundland cables. ‘This cable proved costly in repairs 
and did not wear well. 
More active competition with the Newfoundland lines came 
in 1875 when the Direct United States Cable Company opened 
