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We now pass to the second great tendency which, as is here affirmed, organization and moral discipline are unitedly tending to establish on this shore.  An inevitable consequence of the nervous intensity and susceptibility characteristic of Americans is an access of personal magnetism, or influence; we keenly feel each other, have social impressibility.  The nervous is the public element in the body, the mediating and communicating power.  It is the agent of every sense,—­of sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell,—­and of the power of speech.  It is the vehicle of all fellow-feeling, of all social sympathy.  It introduces man to man, and makes strangers acquainted.  And a most unceremonious master of these ceremonies it is;—­running indiscriminately across ranks; introducing beggar and baron; forcing the haughtiest master, spite of his theories, to feel that the slave is a man and a fellow; compelling the prince to acknowledge the peasant,—­not with a shake of the hand, perhaps, but, it may be, with knee-shakings and heart-shakings.  A terrible leveller and democrat is this master element in the human frame; yet king and kaiser must entertain him in courts and on thrones.  Now the high development of this in the American Man renders him communicative, gives him a quick interest in men; he cannot let them pass without giving and taking.  Hence the much-blamed inquisitiveness,—­“What is your name?  Where do you live?  Where are you going?  What is your business?  Do you eat baked beans on Sunday?” Mrs. Trollope is horrified; it is a bore; but one likes the man the better for it.  He is interested in you;—­that is the simple secret of all.  King Carlyle calls us “eighteen millions of bores.”  To be sure; is that so bad?  The primitive English element was pirate; let the primitive American be bore.  The fathers of the Britain that is took men by the throat; let the fathers of the America that is to be take them by the—­button;—­that is amelioration enough for one thousand years!  In truth, this intense personal interest which characterizes the American, though often awkwardly manifested and troublesome, is an admirable feature in his constitution, and few traits should awaken our pride or expectation more.  It is this keen fellow-feeling that fits him for the broadest and most beneficent public interest.  This makes him a philanthropist.  And his philanthropy is peculiar.  It is not merely of the neighborhood sort, such as sends a Thanksgiving turkey to poor Robert and a hat that does not fit well to poor Peter.  For here the predilection for principles and generalizations comes in, and leads him to translate his fellow-feeling into social axioms.  Thus it occurs that the American is that man who is grappling most earnestly and intelligently with the problem of man’s relation to man.  In every village is some knot of active minds that brood over questions of this kind.  The monarch newspaper of America is deeply tinged with the same hue; nor could one with a contrary complexion attain its position.  This great current of human interest floats our politics; it feeds the springs of enthusiasm, coming forth in doctrines of non-resistance, of government by love, and the like; and our literature contains essays upon love and friendship which, in our judgment, are not equalled in the literature of the world.