“Gonon has his telegraph on the Capitol, and a committee of the Senate reported in favor of trying his for a short distance, and will pass a bill this session if we are not doing something.  Some means, somehow, must be raised.  I have been compelled to stop my machine just at the moment of completion.  I cannot move a step without running in debt, and that I cannot do.

“As to the company that was thought of to carry the Telegraph into operation here, it is another of those ignes fatui that have just led me on to waste a little more time, money, and patience, and then vanished.  The gentleman who proposed the matter was, doubtless, friendly disposed, but he lacks judgment and perseverance in a matter of this sort.

“If Congress would but pass the bill of $30,000 before them, there would be no difficulty.  There is no difficulty in the scientific or mechanical part of the matter; that is a problem solved.  The only difficulty that remains is obtaining funds, which Congress can furnish, to carry it into execution.  I have a great deal to say, but must stop for want of time to write more.”

But he does not stop.  He is so full of his subject that he continues at some length:—­

“Everything done by me in regard to the Telegraph is at arm’s length.  I can do nothing without consultation, and when I wish to consult on the most trivial thing I have three letters to write, and a week or ten days to wait before I can receive an answer.

“I feel at times almost ready to cast the whole matter to the winds, and turn my attention forever from the subject.  Indeed, I feel almost inclined, at tunes, to destroy the evidences of priority of invention in my possession and let Wheatstone and England take the credit of it.  For it is tantalizing in the highest degree to find the papers and the lecturers boasting of the invention as one of the greatest of the age, and as an honor to America, and yet to have the nation by its representatives leave the inventor without the means either to put his invention fairly before his countrymen, or to defend himself against foreign attack.

“If I had the means in any way of support in Washington this winter, I would go on in the middle of January and push the matter, but I cannot run the risk.  I would write a detailed history of the invention, which would be an interesting document to have printed in the Congressional documents, and establish beyond contradiction both priority and superiority of my invention.  Has not the Postmaster-General, or Secretary of War or Treasury, the power to pay a few hundred dollars from a contingent fund for such purposes?

“Whatever becomes of the invention through the neglect of those who could but would not lend a helping hand, you, my dear sir, will have the reflection that you did all in your power to aid me, and I am deterred from giving up the matter as desperate most of all for the consideration that those who kindly lent their aid when the invention was in its infancy would suffer, and that, therefore, I should not be dealing right by them.  If this is a little blue, forgive it.”