" ...We are gathered to express our joy at the apparent consummation of one of those enterprises which are peculiar, I had almost said to our generation--certainly to the century in which we live. Do you reflect that there are men among you to-night, men here, who lived and were not very young before there was a steamboat on our waters? Ever since I can remember steamboats have always been at hand. There are men here who lived before they beat the waters with their wheels. And since my day railroads have been invented. I remember the first one on this land very distinctly. It was after I had graduated from college, and I am not a patriarch yet. It is within our remembrance that the telegraph itself was invented, and by a mere citizen of ours in this vicinity. All these pre-eminent methods of civilization and commerce and economy have been within the remembrance of young men--all but one within the remembrance of quite young men. Now this is not so much an invention as an enlarged application.... "I thought all the way in riding down here to-night how strange it will seem to have that silent cord lying in the sea, perfectly noiseless, perfectly undisturbed by war or by storm, by the paddles of steamers, by the thunders of navies above it, far down beyond all anchors' reach, beyond all plumbing interference. There will be earthquakes that will shake the other world, and the tidings of them will come under the silent sea, and we shall know them upon the hither side, but the cord will be undisturbed, though it bears earthquakes to us. Markets will go up and fortunes will be made down in the depths of the sea. The silent highway will carry it without noise to us. Fortunes will go down and bankruptcies spread dismay, and the silent road will bear this message without a jar and without disturbance. Without voice or speech it will communicate thunders and earthquakes and tidings of war and revolutions, and all those things that fill the air with clamor. They will come quick as thought from the scene of their first fever and excitement, flash quick as thought and silent on their passage, and then break out on this side with fresh tremor and anxiety. To me the functions of that wire seem, in some sense, sublime. Itself impassive, quiet, still, moving either hemisphere at its extremities by the tidings that are to issue out from it....