“I wish there was some way of stopping this harassing, paralyzing litigation.  I find my mind wholly unfit for the studies which the present state of the Telegraph requires from me, being distracted and irritated by the constant necessity for standing on the defensive.  Smith will be Smith I know, and, therefore, as he is the appointed thorn to keep a proper ballast of humility in S.F.B.M. with his load of honors, why, be it so, if I can only have the proper strength and disposition to use the trial aright....  Write me some encouraging news if you can.  How will the present calm in political affairs affect our California matters?”

The calm to which he referred was the apparent one which had settled down on the country after the election of Buchanan, and which, as everybody knows, was but the calm before the storm of our Civil War.  He has this to say about the election in a letter to the Honorable John Y. Mason, our Minister to France:—­

“I may congratulate you, my dear Sir, on the issue of the late election.  My predictions have been verified.  The country is quiet, and, as usual after the excitement of an election, has settled down into orderly acquiescence to the will of the majority, and into general good feeling.  Europeans can hardly understand this truly anomalous phase of our American institutions; they do not understand that it is characteristic that ‘we speak daggers but use none’; that we fight with ballots and not with bullets; that we have abundance of inkshed and little bloodshed, and that all that is explosive is blown off through newspaper safety-valves.”

The events of the next few years were destined to shatter the peaceful visions of this lover of his country, for many daggers were drawn, the bullets flew thick and fast, and the bloodshed was appalling.

It is difficult to follow the history of the telegraph, in its relation to its inventor, through all the intricacies involved in the conflicting interests of various companies and men in this its formative period.

Morse himself was often at a loss to determine on the course which he should pursue, a course which would at the same time inure to his financial benefit and be in accordance with his high sense of right.  Absolutely straightforward and honest himself, it was difficult for him to believe that others who spoke him fair were not equally sincere, and he was often imposed upon, and was frequently forced, in the exigencies of Business, to be intimately associated with those whose ideas of right and wrong were far different from his own.  The one person in whose absolute integrity he had faith was Amos Kendall, and yet he must sometimes have thought that his friend was too severe in his judgment of others, for I find in a letter of Mr. Kendall’s of January 4, 1857, the following warning:—­