All work for the coming year having apparently been most satisfactorily settled, he returned home in September. A friend on the steamer with him said:
“We heard Mr. Field was a passenger. We felt the deepest sympathy for him, and to our surprise he was the life of the ship and the most cheerful one on board. He said: ‘We have learned a great deal, and next summer we shall lay the cable without doubt.’ ”
But again came discouragement. November 3d Captain Anderson wrote:
“I cannot yet write a cheerful letter.... I cannot see any difficulty to our success but the one item of money. We are losing time. The board has already lost its margin, and it will end, must end now, by being in a hurry at the last.
“I am sorry you are not here. Somehow no one seems to push when you are absent.”
On November 27th Mr. Field wrote to Mr. Saward:
“Unless I have more favorable news from London in regard to the Atlantic telegraph, it is my intention to sail for Liverpool on the Scotia on the 13th of December.”
He did not reach England a day too soon. On December 22d the Attorney-General had given the opinion that only an act of Parliament could legalize the issue of the twelve per cent. preference shares. Parliament was not to meet until February, and then there would be a delay in passing the bill. For this reason the money subscribed had been returned, and the work of manufacturing the cable stopped. Mr. Field accepted the opinion given, but also saw a way out of the difficulty. It seems as if Mr. O’Neil’s words in Blackwood’s Magazine referred to this crisis and not to the failure of the previous summer:
“Mr. Cyrus Field, the pioneer of Atlantic enterprise, full of hope and confidence, and never betraying anxiety or despair even at the most serious disaster—a man whose restless energy is best shown in his spare yet strong frame, as if his daily food but served for the development of schemes for the benefit of mankind in general and the profit of individuals in particular, every stoppage in our progress being marked by the issue of a fresh prospectus, each showing an increase of dividend as the certain result of confiding speculation—and, I say, all honor to him for his unswerving resolution to complete that great work for the success of which he has toiled so long and so earnestly.”
It was on December 30th that Captain Anderson wrote: