We have seen that Morse was said to be a hundred years ahead of his time as an artist.  From the sentences above quoted it would appear that he was far in advance of his contemporaries in some questions of national policy, for the plan outlined by him for the proper governmental control of a great public utility, like the telegraph, it seems to me, should appeal to those who, at the present time, are agitating for that very thing.  Had the legislators and the people of 1838 been as wise and clear-headed as the poor artist-inventor, a great leap forward in enlightened statecraft would have been undertaken at a cost inconceivably less than would now be the case.  Competent authorities estimate that to purchase the present telegraph lines in this country at their market valuation would cost the Government in the neighborhood of $500,000,000; to parallel them would cost some $25,000,000.  The enormous difference in these two sums represents what was foretold by Morse would happen if the telegraph should become a monopoly in the hands of speculators.  The history of the telegraph monopoly is too well known to be more than alluded to here, but it is only fair to Morse to state that he had sold all his telegraph stock, and had retired from active participation in the management of the different companies, long before the system of stock-watering began which has been carried on to the present day.

And for what sum could the Government have kept this great invention under its own control?  It is on record that Morse offered, in 1844, after the experimental line between Washington and Baltimore had demonstrated that the telegraph was a success, to sell all the rights in his invention to the Government for $100,000, and would have considered himself amply remunerated.

But the legislators and the people of 1838, and even those of 1844, were not wise and far-sighted; they failed utterly to realize what a magnificent opportunity had been offered to them for a mere song; and this in spite of the fact that the few who did glimpse the great future of the telegraph painted it in glowing terms.

It is true that the House of Representatives had passed the resolution referred to earlier in this chapter, but that is as far as they went for several years.  On the 6th of April, 1838, Mr. F.O.J.  Smith made a long report on the petition of Morse asking for an appropriation sufficient to enable him to test his invention adequately.  In the course of this report Mr. Smith indulged in the following eulogistic words:—­

“It is obvious, however, that the influence of this invention over the political, commercial, and social relations of the people of this widely extended country, looking to nothing beyond, will, in the event of success, of itself amount to a revolution unsurpassed in moral grandeur by any discovery that has been made in the arts and sciences, from the most distant period to which authentic history extends to the present day.  With the means of almost instantaneous