this flying brain-steed will swiftly bring him to his goal.  Nay, it is best that even meanness should ripen.  The slaveholder of South Carolina must avouch a false principle to cover his false practice,—­must affirm that slavery is a Divine institution.  It is well.  A Quaker, hearing a fellow blaspheme, said,—­“That is right, friend; get such bad stuff out of thee!” A lie is dangerous, till it is told,—­like scarlatina, before it is brought to the surface:  when either breaks out, it is more than half conquered.  The only falsehoods of appalling efficacy for evil are those which circulate subtly in the vital unconsciousness of powerful but obscure or undemonstrative natures,—­deadly from the intimacy which also makes them secret and secure, and silently perverting to their own purposes the normal vigors of the system.  A Mephistopheles is not dangerous; he is too clear-headed; he knows his own deserts:  some muddiness is required to harbor self-deceptions, in order that badness may reach real working power.  To all perversion iron limits are, indeed, set; but obscure falsehood works in the largest spaces and with the longest tether.—­Thus the expressive intensity which appertains to this organization is serviceable every way, even in what might, at first blush, seem wholly evil effects.

While thus the brain-hand of the American is formed for grasping principles, for apprehending the simple, subtile, universal truths which slip through coarser and more sluggish fingers, there is also an influence on the moral and intellectual faculties, coming in to accept and use these cerebral ones.  We are more in conversation with the heart and pure spiritual fact of humanity than any other people of equal power and culture.  We necessarily deal more with each other on a bond and basis of common persuasion, of open unenacted truth, than others.  This matter is of moment enough to justify somewhat formal elucidation.

Nations, like individual men, birds, and many quadrupeds and fishes, are house-builders.  They wall and roof themselves in with symbols, creeds, codes, customs, etiquettes, and the like; they stigmatize by the terms heresy, high-treason, and names of milder import, any attempt to quit this edifice; and send such offenders into purgatory, penitentiary, coventry, as the case may be.  Some nations omit to insert either door or window; they make penal even the desire to look out of doors, even the assertion that a sky exists other than the roof of their building, or that there is any other than a very unblessed out-of-doors beyond its walls.  Such are countries where free speech is forbidden, where free thought is racked and thumb-screwed, and where not only a man’s overt actions, but his very hopes, his faith, his prayers, are prescribed.  Here man is put into his own institutions, as into a box; and a very bad box it proves.  Now these blank walls not only encompass society as a mass, but also run between individuals, cutting off bosom