That it is capable of being, and will actually be, at no distant day, extensively employed as such a medium, it seems to the committee there can be but little room to doubt. Such a result seems, indeed, to be rendered altogether certain, when, in addition to the capacities of the instrument, we take into consideration its cheapness. For little more than $100,000, Baltimore can be connected with New York; and for a like sum, New York with Boston. There would then be an unbroken telegraphic line from Boston to Washington; passing through New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and the other considerable towns on the route. What a vast number of short commercial letters would such a line be able to attract to itself, and to despatch every day, far in advance of the ordinary transportation by mail. Nor would any danger of a detrimental divulgence of their affairs exist to deter merchants and men of business from resorting to the telegraph; because, in the first place, the simple expedient of a concerted cipher between distant correspondents would protect their communications with a shield of secrecy impenetrable even to the officers and managers of the telegraph. And in the next place, the very nature of their functions will require that these persons shall be men of great trustworthiness, and that they shall moreover be placed under the most stringent official obligations of secrecy in regard to the contents of private communications. Under such circumstances, men of business need no more apprehend danger of improper publicity from employing the telegraph, than from the necessity of having clerks in their counting-houses to pen and copy their correspondence. If all these advantages should have the effect of attracting to the telegraph the amount of custom which to the committee seems probable, it is obvious that a very moderate tariff of charges would produce income enough to make it a gainful property—at least upon such a line as that from Boston to Washington. It is upon this ground the committee base the belief that it is destined soon to be established along that whole line, if not by government, certainly by private capital and enterprise; and then a state of things will immediately develop itself, which the people will never endure nor tolerate the government in permitting to exist. That state of things would be that the post office, in its transportation of all correspondence and news, would lag not hours, but days, behind the transmission of the same things through another medium; and that, a medium belonging to private individuals, and controlled by private views and interests.