On this subject we have the testimony of one of the best of British
popular publications,—“Chambers’s Papers for the People,” published in
1851,—whose words we quote:—
“The scale of charges in the United States is much lower than in this
country; the electric telegraph is consequently more available to the
greater part of the population engaged in commercial affairs. Apart from
business and politics, the Americans have made the telegraph subservient
to other uses; medical practitioners in distant towns have been
consulted, and their prescriptions transmitted along the wire; and a
short time since a gallant gentleman in Boston married a lady in New
York by telegraph,—a process which may supersede the necessity for
elopement, provided the law hold the ceremony valid. A favorable idea of
the immediate practical utility of the telegraph may be gathered from a
communication to the present writer from New York. ‘The telegraph,’ he
writes, ‘is used in this country by all classes except the very poorest,
the same as the mail. The most ordinary messages are sent in this way,—a
joke, an invitation to a party, an inquiry about health, &c. At the
offices they are accommodating, and will inquire about messages that
have miscarried or have not been answered, without extra charge.’ The
lines in the United States are carried across the country regardless of
travelled thoroughfares; over tracts of sand and swamp, through the wild
primeval forest where man has not yet begun his contest with nature,
where even the rudiments of civilization are yet to be learned. Away it
stretches, the metallic indicator of intellectual supremacy, traversing
regions haunted by the rattlesnake and the alligator, solitudes that
re-echo with nocturnal howlings of the wolf and the bear. Communications
are maintained from North to South, East and West, through all the
length and breadth of the mighty Union, and with a frequency and social
purpose exceeding that of any other nation. In one stretch, Maine and
Vermont, where winter with deepest snows and arctic temperature usurps
six months of the year, are united with the lands of the tropics, where
the magnolia blooms and palm-trees grow in perpetual summer. Subordinate
lines bring the great lakes—the inland seas—into direct communication
with the ocean ports on the eastern shore. Nothing stops the restless,
enterprising spirit of that people.”