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Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our
attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an
unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive
at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste
to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and
Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is
in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to
a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end
of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if
the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are
eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some
weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak
through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the
Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose
horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important
messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating
locusts and wild honey.


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