432 Miscellaneous Intelligence. 
of commercial affairs in general, we know what a change has taken 
place in the transmission of intelligence relating to business within a 
few years past; and it would seem too, as if every new impulse in 
business rendered it necessary to add new energy to our means of 
comenenneers Is it too much to suppose that the demands of busi- 
paeeamieisiontt between our principal cities? 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 | have been pre- 
paring to meet you at this time, the question has been agitated as to the 
practicability of a i gl line for purposes of business between 
e of our northern manufactures and this city. And 
why may we not “ida forward to the time, when there shall be such a 
coal teeeiedtion between this city and New York, Philadelphia and 
gton or som 
stances in which they are placed, to greater and more intense exertion 
ona the same number of people have probably ever been,—when we 
, that all ordinary calculations founded upon the precedents of 
poe nations, fall short of what is here — accomplished—when 
we witness all this, we cannot believe that it i s being too sanguine to 
~~ the application of the telegraph to a vastly greater extent than 
ave yet seen. Will it be said that the demands of business will 
in two ays or less or at the rate “ eight or ten miles an hour, any man 
can perceive that there may be seteenis benefit, when we can 
transmit the same information for that distance by telegraph at the rate 
of four miles ina wa 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, =e case of the great questions 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 oF 
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? 
way do we > ofa see such ecinery efforts made, to pope 
deemed necessary to the wants of an active community, who will v 
ture to set bounds to its aeprottion: ? We can in imagination ‘acme 
Rt i aE 
* Mr. Pickering here — to the old form of telegraph by which satelgene is 
communicated from station to station by means of wa ag a 
