“All my leisure (if that may be called leisure which employs nearly all my time) is devoted to perfecting the whole matter.  The invention of the correspondent, I think you will say, is a more essential improvement.  It has been my winter’s labor, and, to avoid expense, I have been compelled to make it entirely with my own hands.  I can now give you its exact dimensions—­twelve and a half inches long, six and a half wide, and six and a half deep.  It dispenses entirely with boxes of type (one set alone being necessary) and dispenses also with the rules, and with all machinery for moving the rules.  There is no winding up and it is ready at all times.  You touch the letter and the letter is written immediately at the other extremity....  In my next I hope to send you reports of my further progress.  One thing seems certain, my Telegraph has driven out of the field all the other plans on the magnetic principle.  I hear nothing of them in public or private.  No society notices them.”

“February 2. I can compare the state of things here to an April day, at one moment sunshine, at the next cloudy.  The Telegraph is evidently growing in favor; testimonials of approbation and compliments multiply, and yesterday I was advised by the secretary of the Academie Industrielle to interest moneyed men in the matter if I intended to profit by it; and he observed that now was the precise time to do it in the interval of the Chambers.

“I am at a loss how to act.  I am not a business man and fear every movement which suggests itself to me.  I am thinking of proposing a company on the same plan you last proposed in your letter from Liverpool, and which you intend to create in case the Government shall choose to do nothing; that is to say, a company taking the right at one thousand francs per mile, paying the proprietors fifty per cent in stocks and fifty per cent in cash, raising about fifty thousand francs for a trial some distance.  I shall take advice and let you know the result.

“I wish you were here; I am sure something could be done by an energetic business man like yourself.  As for poor me I feel that I am a child in business matters.  I can invent and perfect the invention, and demonstrate its uses and practicability, but ‘further the deponent saith not.’  Perhaps I underrate myself in this case, but that is not a usual fault in human nature.”

It was natural that a keen business man like F.O.J.  Smith should have leaned rather toward a private corporation, with its possibilities of great pecuniary gain, than toward government ownership.  Morse, on the contrary, would have preferred, both at home and abroad, to place the great power which he knew his invention was destined to wield in the hands of a responsible government.  However, so eager was he to make a practical test of the telegraph that, governments apparently not appreciating their great opportunity, he was willing to entrust the enterprise to capitalists.  Here again he was balked, however, for, writing of his trials later, he says:—­