GENTLEMEN,--I have received your polite invitation to join with you in the celebration of the birthday of Washington. Although unable to be present in person, I shall still be with you in heart. Every year, indeed every day, is demonstrating the necessity of our being wide awake to the insidious sapping of our institutions by foreign emissaries in the guise of friends, who, taking advantage of the very liberality and unparalleled national generosity which we have extended to them, are undermining the foundations of our political fabric, substituting (as far as they are able to effect their purpose) on the one hand a dark, cold and heartless atheism, or, on the other, a disgusting, puerile, degrading superstition in place of the God of our fathers and the glorious elevating religion of love preached by his Son. The American mind, I trust, is now in earnest waking up, and no one more rejoices at the signs of the times than myself. Twenty years ago I hoped to have seen it awake, but, alas! it proved to be but a spasmodic yawn preparatory to another nap. If it shall now have waked in earnest, and with renewed strength shall gird itself to the battle which is assuredly before it, I shall feel not a little in the spirit of good old Simeon-- "Now let thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." Go forward, my friends, in your patriotic work, and may God bless you in your labors with eminent success. It has been shown, I think, in the course of this work, that Morse, while long-suffering and patient under trials and afflictions, was by no means poor-spirited, but could fight and use forceful language when roused by acts of injustice towards himself, his country, or his sense of right. Nothing made him more righteously angry than dishonesty in whatever form it was manifested, and the following incident is characteristic. On June 26, 1855, Mr. Kendall forwarded a letter which he had received from a certain Milton S. Latham, member of Congress from California, making a proposition to purchase the Morse patent rights for lines in California. In this letter occur the following sentences: "For the use of Professor Morse's patent for the State of California in perpetuity, with the reservations named in yours of the 3d March, 1855, addressed to me, they are willing to give you $30,000 in their stock. This is all they will do. It is proper I should state that the capital stock of the California State Telegraph in cash was $75,000, which they raised to $150,000, and subsequently to $300,000. The surplus stock over the cash stock was used among members of the Legislature to procure the passage of the act incorporating the company, and securing for it certain privileges."