“ This is but a faint expression of my estimation of your wonderful energy and persistency and faith in the great work to which so many years of your life have been devoted.
“The world as yet does not know how much it owes to you, and this generation will never know it. I regard what has been done as the most marvellous thing in human history. I think it more marvellous than the invention of printing, or, I am almost ready to say, than the voyage of the Genoese. ”

“ The name of Cyrus W. Field is worthy of association with those of Fulton, Stephenson, Morse, and Ericsson as benefactors to mankind. Inheriting from a vigorous ancestry a capacity, energy, and perseverance that would brook no obstacles—characteristic of other members of his family as well—he strode from poverty to wealth, through various vicissitudes, but with unstained integrity. Engaged in gigantic enterprises, he stood on the brink of financial ruin in promoting them; endured failure on the verge of success, despair on the heels of hope, ridicule swift after praise, long unbroken ”

“ The best friends of his life, he tells us, have been Americans—Prescott, Charles Sumner, Motley, Longfellow, and his host, Mr. Cyrus Field. He has brought back vivid memories of his brief visit to America, and paints for us one or two vivid pictures of American scenery and American life. He rejoices in our joy; in our independence; in the triumph of the Union over the rebellion; in the triumph we have since won here in England over English unfriendliness. And he says, truly, that it is difficult now to find an Englishman who is not convinced he was on our side all the time. ”

“ Acts are better than words, and in the acts we are met here to perform we but express the gratitude we feel to those who through so many difficulties and discouragements have brought this great work to a successful termination. This success is one of which we, as a nation, are proud, and rightly so. But it is good for our humility—a virtue in which we do not naturally excel—to remember that the first credit of that success is due, not to an Englishman, but to an American, Mr. Cyrus Field. ”

“ We may now, without exaggeration, say that England and America are no longer separated by the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean, for even during this dinner we have been corresponding briskly with our American friends; and it is impossible, gentlemen, to resist the conclusion that this greatest triumph of modern science must have the effect of softening prejudice, increasing and cementing good feeling, and in every way promoting the welfare and the prosperity of the two great peoples so brought together. ”

“ Cyrus Field, in the prosecution of this great work (not being a sailor, always bear that in mind) , has crossed the Atlantic more than forty times; and he has, as you know, by an energy almost without example, by a courage nothing could daunt, by a faith that nothing could make to falter, and by sacrifices beyond estimation—for there are sacrifices that he has made I would not in his presence relate to this meeting—aided by discovery and by science and by capital, he has accomplished the grandest triumph which the science and the intellect of man have ever achieved. ”

“ And I believe the success of this enterprise would have been delayed for many years—perhaps for whole generations of men—had it not been for the single exertions, for the confidence and zeal, for the foresight and faith, amounting, as I think, to genius, of our distinguished guest, Mr. Cyrus Field. None of us in our day, I rejoice to think, are disposed to undervalue the influence which the spirit of commercial enterprise is having upon the progress and civilization of mankind. ”

“ I conclude that such a nation as the United States—such a people, so free and so instructed—will not be twenty-five years before they remedy the evils and the blunders and the unequal burdens of their taxation and their tariff. They will discover, in much less time than we discovered it, that a great nation is advanced by freedom of industry and of commerce, and that without this freedom every other kind of freedom is but a partial good. ”

“ Why have you not more faith in the future of a nation which should lead for ages to come the American continent, which in five or ten years will make up its apparent loss or first loss of strength and numbers, and which, with a career unencumbered by the terrible calamity and curse of slavery, will even from the first be liberated from a position morally and incurably false, and will from the first enjoy a permanent gain in credit and character such as will much more than compensate for its temporary material losses? ”

“ They are yet young men who remember the arrival of the Sirius and the Liverpool and the Great Western. Their coming was the occasion of a thousandfold greater excitement than the laying of the cable. Yet if some visionary enthusiast had said to his friend as they watched with awe the steaming in or out of those huge ships, ‘Before we are bald or gray we shall look upon these vessels as we now look from the express train upon the slow old stage-coaches,’ he would have been tolerated only as a harmless maniac.... ”

“ My Lords and Gentlemen,—It now becomes my duty to propose that which is pre-eminently the toast of the evening, and to ask you to return to our distinguished guest our warm and hearty acknowledgments of the great service he has rendered to England, to America, and to the world by his exertions in promoting the success of the Atlantic telegraph, an enterprise which is the culminating triumph of a long series of discoveries prosecuted by many generations of men. It is not easy to apportion with exactitude the merits which may belong to those who have engaged in it ”

“ It was exceedingly beautiful, and as the long line moved through Broadway surrounded by an enthusiastic crowd on every side, and lighted by thousands of torches, candles, and colored lanterns, one might easily have imagined himself in a fairy-land. It was long after midnight before the great assemblage dispersed, and even then the streets did not resume their wonted aspect.... The fact is, that an avalanche of people descended upon us, and New York was crushed for once; but we do not lay Atlantic cables every day.”
On the 2d of September, at seven o’clock, a dinner ended the celebration. ”

“ If the contemplation of future fame has a charm for you, you may well indulge in the reflection, for the name of Cyrus Field will now go onward to immortality as long as that of the Atlantic telegraph shall be known to mankind. ”

“ We can only stand, and look on, and wonder, and adore. But of the agency—the human agency—concerned we may more freely speak. I honor the great inventors. In their lifetime they seldom receive all the consideration to which they are entitled.... I honor Professor Wheatstone and Professor Morse and all those men of science who have made this great marvel possible; and I honor the gallant captain of that great ship, whose precious cargo, not landed in any port, but sunk in ocean’s solitary depths, has brought measureless blessings to mankind ”

“ I trust our own country and government will always stand as a bright and shining light in the pathway of nations to cheer on with hope the suffering millions of mankind who are now struggling for life, liberty, and happiness—a happiness that is possible to men and nations who will cultivate the arts of peace instead of wasting their energies in wars of mutual destruction. ”

“ David Dudley Field, and his delight was to lay snares in dark halls and passages, and if he was opposed he did not hesitate to seize a carving-knife and flourish it frantically about. A civilized life was not attractive to him; and while Mr. Field was in England in 1856, his relations, who had tried in vain to Christianize the boy, decided to return him to his father, a bull-fighter in South America. ”

“ We had cast the grapnel thirty times. It was a little before midnight on Friday night that we hooked the cable, and it was a little after midnight Sunday morning that we got it on board. What was the anxiety of those twenty-six hours? The strain on every man’s life was like the strain on the cable itself. When finally it appeared it was midnight; the lights of the ship, and in the boats around our bows, as they flashed in the faces of the men, showed them eagerly watching for the cable to appear on the water. ”

“ Cyrus Field was at Willis’s Rooms last night. Not often, certainly, is such a banquet given in England to a man who is neither a politician nor a soldier.... Mr. Field, when he glanced around that splendidly filled banquet-room last night, may have felt but little personal pride in the well-merited honors he received. But he must have felt gratified at the evidence thus practically and brilliantly afforded that the public of civilized nations are at last trying to unlearn the fatal habit which made them so long ungrateful to some of their best benefactors. ”

“ And when all men through the globe are readers, when all men through the globe are thinkers, when all men through the globe are actors—are actors because they think right—when they speak nation to nation, when from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same there is not alone a free intercourse of thought but one current of heart, virtue, religion, love—then the earth will have blossomed and consummated its history. ”

“ I rejoice at it for the sake of our common nationalities, and last, but not least, for your personal sake I most heartily and sincerely rejoice with you, and congratulate you upon this happy termination to the fearful anxiety, the continuous and oppressive labor, and the never-ceasing, sleepless energy which the successful accomplishment of this vast and noble enterprise has entailed on you. Never was man more devoted, never did man’s energies better deserve success than yours have done. ”

“ This great triumph may be looked at from various points of view, and in the first place I think I am safe in saying that we all feel it to be a triumph of pure science—I say, of pure science, of the pure desire and love of knowledge.... I have the honor of speaking to many distinguished scientific men, and I think they will hear me out when I say that if there is one question which they hear with the utmost indignation and contempt addressed to them when they are in the course of their investigations it is the question, What is the use of their discoveries? ”

“ What little I could do has been done, and the enterprise is now in the hands of the contractors, who, I am sure, will carry it out to a triumphant success. It will do much to bind together England and America, and base, indeed, will be the man, to whatever country he may belong, that may dare, with an unhallowed tongue or venomous pen, to sow discord among those who speak the same language and profess the same religion, and who ought to be on terms of the completest friendship. ”

“ Yet in tracing the birth and pedigree of the modern telegraph, ‘American’ is not the highest term of the series that connects the past with the present; there is at least one higher term, the highest of all, which cannot and must not be ignored. If not a sparrow falls to the ground without a definite purpose in the plans of infinite wisdom, can the creation of an instrumentality so vitally affecting the interests of the whole human race have an origin less humble than the Father of every good and perfect gift? ”

“ I am confident that whatever hesitation may for a time retard the work, it will not be of that kind to defeat the enterprise. With regard to the argument that this telegraph is in the power of the English government, and that we would be debarred from its use in time of war, let it be borne in mind that it may be built by Great Britain without our co-operation. The English government is alive to all the great necessities of the day. I wish, indeed, our own were equally alive to the urgencies of the age. ”

“ The Atlantic cable is a monument to his memory that shall endure while time shall last, but as the promoter of the elevated railroad in New York, at a time when its feasibility was problematical, success uncertain, and capital was timid, he is entitled no less to the grateful memory of our people. ”

“ The new national banks are being organized as rapidly as prudence allows, and no doubt can, I think, be longer entertained that, whatever else may happen, we shall have gained, through the rebellion, an opportunity, not unimproved, of establishing a safe and uniform currency for the whole nation—a benefit in itself compensating in some degree, and in no small degree, for the evils we have endured. I trust you are succeeding well in your great scheme of the inter-continental telegraph. It is an enterprise worthy of this day of great things. ”

“ Cyrus W. Field is too earnest and energetic a man, too completely devoted to great projects and great success, to have much of mere egotism left in him. A life so thoroughly absorbed in pursuits which belong to the business and benefit of the whole world can have little time for the indulgence of vanity. ”

“ Nothing in this diary is so remarkable and characteristic as the tone of absolute confidence while the issue of the voyage was still in doubt. It was this confidence that not only sustained the projectors of the enterprise through all its mutations, but that infected his associates. Perhaps it was the moral effect of his mere presence, even more than the labor of which he took so large a share, that made them so often appeal for his return to England. ”

“ Men here forget that, after all, we are but one nation having two governments, we are of the same noble and heroic race. Half the English family is on this side of the Atlantic in its ancient home, and the other half over the ocean (there being no room for them here) settled on the American continent. It is so with thousands of individual families throughout this country. No member of my family has emigrated to America for forty years past, and yet I have far more blood relations in the United States than I have within the limits of the United Kingdom ”

“ It is no longer in her own race that Russia can keep her thoughts and her plans. It is no longer in the glorious old British Islands that their commercial intelligence can be confined. It is wafted round and round the globe. In less than an hour, whenever this system shall be completed, the world will be enlightened quicker than by the sun; quicker than by the meteor’s flash. What is known in one place will be known in all places; the globe will have but one ear, and that ear will be everywhere.... ”

“ Field’s position as regards the Atlantic telegraph. Other men may have thought of the project; other men may, for aught we know, have thought of it even before he did; other men may have mentally planned it out, and proposed schemes for its realization.... The idea is not exclusively Mr. Field’s; nor is the success exclusively his. But assuredly his was the energy, the prodigious strength of will, the unconquerable perseverance, which forced the scheme upon the intellect, the activity, and the influence of England and America, and never desisted until the dream had become a reality. ”

“ John Bright, in a splendid tribute to ‘his friend Cyrus Field,’ spoke of him as ‘the Columbus of modern times, who, by his cable, had moored the New World alongside the Old.’ Mr. Evarts said: ‘Columbus found one world and left it two. Cyrus W. Field found two continents and left them one.’
“In all the years that have passed, this cord of connection between the Old World and the New has grown more practical and useful, and the old cities in the far Eastern world can now communicate with the new cities of our Pacific shores in a few moments of time. ”

“ You know I think prevention better than cure, and that it is the distinct duty of a ship-master to be familiar with what is to be apprehended, and, so far as he can, to have some plans in his mind to which he can resort when his foresight has proved insufficient. I do not apprehend or fear any difficulty to your great enterprise, but as little as possible should be left to chance or inspiration. ”

“ It is surely a most wonderful fact that in the most brilliant civilizations of the ancient world the wise men of those times—and they were men so wise that many of us to this day are influenced by their thoughts—many of those men held that commercial enterprise was the bane of nations. Now I must say this, that of all commercial enterprises which have ever been undertaken, this one on the part of Mr. Cyrus Field represents the noblest and purest motives by which commercial enterprise can ever be inspired. ”

“ Resolved, That by the successful carrying out of the project for uniting the Old World with the New by the Atlantic cable he has brought all nations into instant touch and given lasting honor to his name, as among those who have done the world great service. During the long and weary years of discouragement and failure before this magnificent work was accomplished he showed an undaunted courage, a fertility of resource, an unwearied patience and untiring ability for work which won the wonder and admiration of two continents. ”

“ But the achievement of the Atlantic cable was none the less as distinctly the work of Mr. Cyrus W. Field as the discovery of America was that of Columbus. It was not he who first thought of doing the thing, but it was he who first made up his mind that it could be done, and showed the world how to do it, and did it in the end. The history of human invention has not a more inspiriting example of patience living down discouragement and perseverance triumphing over defeat....
“At last, in 1866, the feat was accomplished, and the Atlantic telegraph was added to the realities of life. ”