Failing with the private rich, he tried to obtain public support, went to Washington in 1838, exhibited his apparatus to interested congressmen, and petitioned for enough money from the public purse to build a line from Baltimore to Washington,—­forty miles only.  It is traditionally slow work in getting a bill through Congress.  Weary with waiting, Morse went to Europe, to try his new seed in that old soil.  It failed to germinate abroad as it had at home.  Men with money acknowledged that the idea was a scientific success, but could not believe that it might be made a business success.

“What would people care for instantaneous news?” they said.  “Some might, it is true, but the great mass would be content to wait for their news in the good old way.  To lay miles of wire in the earth is to bury a large treasure in money.  We cannot see our way clear to getting it back again out of the pockets of the public.  Your wires work, Mr. Morse, but, from a business point of view, there’s more cost than profit in the idea.”

It may be that these exact words were not spoken, but the answer of Europe was near enough to this to send the inventor home disappointed.  He began again his weary waiting on the slowly-revolving wheels of the congressional machinery.

March 3, 1843, came.  It was the last day of the session.  With the stroke of midnight on that day the existing Congress would die, and a new one be born, with which the weary work of the education of congressmen would have to be gone over again.  The inventor had been given half a loaf.  His bill had been passed, on February 23, in the House.  All day of March 3 he hung about the Senate chamber petitioning, where possible, for the other half of his loaf, faintly hoping that in the last will and testament of the expiring Congress some small legacy might be left for him.

Evening came.  The clock-hands circled rapidly round.  Pressure of bills and confusion of legislation grew greater minute by minute.  The floodgates of the deluge are lifted upon Congress in its last hours, and business pours onward in such an overwhelming fashion that small private petitioners can scarcely hope that the doors of the ark of safety will be opened to their petty claims.  Morse hung about the chamber until the midnight hour was almost ready to strike.  Every moment confusion seemed to grow “worse confounded.”  The work of a month of easy-going legislation was being compressed into an hour of haste and excitement.  The inventor at last left the Capitol, a saddened and disappointed man, and made his way home, the last shreds of hope seeming to drop from him as he went.  He was almost ready to give up the fight, and devote himself for the future solely to brush and pencil.

He slept but poorly that night, and rose the next morning still depressed and gloomy.  He appeared at the breakfast-table with a face from which the very color of ambition seemed to have been washed out.  As he entered the room he was met by a young lady, Miss Annie G. Ellsworth, daughter of the Commissioner of Patents.  The smile on her beaming face was in striking contrast to the gloom on his downcast countenance.