During 1847 the expansion of the telegraphic system amazed all who did not stop to think how much simpler and cheaper the installation of a line was than the building of a road. By March it had reached Pittsburgh on the west, and by September, Petersburg on the south. The next month saw it in Cincinnati and Louisville, and that fall the _Evening Post_ printed telegraph news of a Cincinnati flood which made 5,000 homeless. In its New Year’s message the journal congratulated its readers upon such progress that “the moment a dispatch arrives at New Orleans from our armies in Mexico its contents are known on the borders of the northern lakes.” The next year Florida alone of the States east of the Mississippi was untouched by it. When the President’s message opening Congress in December, 1848, was transmitted to St. Louis, the _Evening Post_ remarked that “the idea of a document filling twelve entire pages of the Washington _Union_ appearing in a city nearly one thousand miles from Washington, twenty-four hours after its delivery, is almost beyond belief.” Christopher Pearse Cranch contributed a poem to the _Post_ upon the marvel: The world of the Past was an infant; It knew not the speech of today, When giants sit talking from mountain to sea, And the cities are wizards, who say: The kingdom of magic is ours; We touch a small clicking machine, And the lands of the East hear the lands of the West With never a bar between. Ten years after the opening of the first American telegraph line Bryant made some caustic remarks in the _Evening Post_ upon “The Slow-Coach System in Europe.” For many months, it transpired, the Allies in the Crimean War had possessed a continuous telegraph line from London to the battle front. It had been demonstrated that dispatches sufficient to fill two columns of the London _Times_ might be sent over it in two hours; yet the French and British publics had been obliged to wait two weeks for full details of the fall of Sebastopol, simply because the Allied authorities did not organize a competent telegraphic staff. IV