nothing like magnetic communication having been known forty years
ago, unless to the half imagination, half realization of one or two
scientific experimenters. Steam and stamps wrought a difference in
degree--the telegraph one of kind. Against eighteen hundred miles of
wagon-road we set seventy-three thousand of railway; but two hundred
thousand miles of telegraph are opposed by nothing, unless by
Franklin's kite-string. Looked at along the perspective of poles, the
old days disappear entirely--the patriots become pre-historic. Yet
modern self-conceit is somewhat checked by the reflection that the
career of these two great agents of intercommunication has but just
opened; that their management even yet remains a puzzle to us; and
that the next generation may wonder how we happened to get hold of
implements whose use and capabilities we so poorly comprehended.
So far as prediction can now be ventured, a force and pathway more
economical than coal and the rail will not soon be forthcoming; nor
is Canton apt to "interview" New York at the rate of more words in a
minute over a single wire than she can now. Some day dynamite may be
harnessed to the balloon, which stands, or drifts, where it did with
Montgolfier, and we may all become long-range projectiles; but even
this age of hurry will contentedly wait a little for that.

Possibly the Post-office Department would be less of a valetudinarian,
financially, had it confined itself to its legitimate occupation, the
speeding of intercourse and wafting of sighs, and not yielded to the
heavy temptation of disseminating shoes, pistols and *garden-seeds
over three millions of square miles. Newspapers are enough to test its
powers as a freight-agent. Where these and their literary kindred
of books, magazines, etc. used to be estimated by the dozen and the
ounce, the ton is becoming too small a unit.