"As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements;" there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. [...] Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. [...] As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly."