Having won his great victory, retirement from the field of battle would have best suited him.  He was now fifty-three years of age, and he felt that he had earned repose.  To this end he sought to carry out his long-cherished idea that the telegraph should become the property of the Government, and he was willing to accept a very modest remuneration.  As I have said before, he and the other proprietors joined in offering the telegraph to the Government for the paltry sum of $100,000.  But the Administration of that day seems to have been stricken with unaccountable blindness, for the Postmaster-General, that same wise and sapient Cave Johnson who had sought to kill the telegraph bill by ridicule in the House, and in despite of his acknowledgment to Morse, reported:  “That the operation of the Telegraph between Washington and Baltimore had not satisfied him that, under any rate of postage that could be adopted, its revenues could be made equal to its expenditures.”  Congress was equally lax, and so the Government lost its great opportunity, for when, in after years, the question of government ownership again came up, it was found that either to purchase outright or to parallel existing lines would cost many more millions than it would have taken thousands in 1844.

The failure of the Government to appreciate the value of what was offered to them was always a source of deep regret to Morse.  For, while he himself gained much more by the operation of private companies, the evils which he had foretold were more than realized.

But to return to the days of ’44, it would seem that in the spring of that year he met with a painful accident.  Its exact nature is not specified, but it must have been severe, and yet we learn from the following letter to his brother Sidney, dated June 23, that he saw in it only another blessing:—­

“I am still in bed, and from appearances I am likely to be held here for many days, perhaps weeks.  The wound on the leg was worse than I at first supposed.  It seems slow in healing and has been much inflamed, although now yielding to remedies.  My hope was to have spent some weeks in New York, but it will now depend on the time of the healing of my leg.

“The ways of God are mysterious, and I find prayer answered in a way not at all anticipated.  This accident, as we are apt to call it, I can plainly see is calculated to effect many salutary objects.  I needed rest of body and mind after my intense anxieties and exertions, and I might have neglected it, and so, perhaps, brought on premature disease of both; but I am involuntarily laid up so that I must keep quiet, and, although the fall that caused my wound was painful at first, yet I have no severe pain with it now.  But the principal effect is, doubtless, intended to be of a spiritual character, and I am afforded an opportunity of quiet reflection on the wonderful dealings of God with me.