On the other hand, detractors innumerable arose; his rights to the invention were challenged, in all sincerity and in insincerity; infringements of his patent rights necessitated long and acrimonious lawsuits, and, like other men of mark, he was traduced and vilified. In addition to all this he took an active interest in the seething politics of the day and in religious questions which, to his mind and that of many others, affected the very foundations of the nation. To follow him through all these labyrinthine ways would require volumes, and I shall content myself with selecting only such letters as may give a fair idea of how he bore himself in the face of these new and manifold trials, of how he sometimes erred in judgment and in action, but how through all he was sincere and firm in his faith, and how, at last, he was to find that home and that domestic bliss which he had all his life so earnestly desired, but which had until the evening of his days been denied to him. 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:--