OLD-TIME ORATORY 183 
to the bottom of the sea, when the cable reported that the 
delay was due simply to an accident to her machinery, that 
would keep her back for a day or two, but that the good ship 
was safe with all on board. What arithmetic can compute the 
value of a single message that relieves so much anguish? Thus 
the submarine telegraph stretched out its long arms under the 
sea, to lay a friendly hand on two peoples, and give assurance 
to both. . . . The heart of the world beat under the sea.” 
It was on such benefits to his fellow creatures that Cyrus 
Field had often pondered as he strode the decks of tossing 
ships on the Atlantic seas during many a foggy or seasick 
night, while the cable uncoiled its slender strands and slipped 
into the dark water below. He himself had experienced a 
taste of the anxiety caused by slow communication when, in 
London during the Civil War, he worried over the raid of 
the Confederate army toward his home and the draft riots in 
New York. An eloquent orator of the period, Edward Ever- 
ett, had pictured the wonder of the cable when he spoke at the 
opening of an observatory in Albany in 1857. 
Everett said in part: “Does it seem all but incredible to 
you that intelligence should travel for two thousand miles, 
along those slender copper wires, far down in the all but fath- 
omless Atlantic, never before penetrated by aught pertaining 
to humanity, save when some foundering vessel has plunged 
with her hapless company to the eternal silence and darkness 
of the abyss? Does it seem, I say, all but a miracle of art, that 
the thoughts of living men—the thoughts that we think up 
here on the earth’s surface, in the cheerful light of day—about 
the markets and the exchanges, and the seasons, and the elec- 
tions, and the treaties, and the wars, and all the fond nothings 
of daily life, should clothe themselves with elemental sparks, 
and shoot with fiery speed, in a moment, in the twinkling of 
an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere, far down among the 
uncouth monsters that wallow in the nether seas, along the 
wreck-paved floor, through the oozy dungeons of the rayless 
