But curtly dismissing the fallacy, that the moral and spiritual faculties are likely to find a sound basis in a cowed and craven reason, we come to a form of fear that practically paralyzes independent thought more than any other, while it is incompatible with manliness and self-respect.  This fear is compounded of self-distrust and that mode of vanity which cowers beneath the invective of men whose applause it neither courts nor values.  If you examine critically the two raging parties of conservatism and radicalism, you will find that a goodly number of their partisans are men who have not chosen their position, but have been bullied into it,—­men who see clearly enough that both parties are based on principles almost equally true in themselves, almost equally false by being detached from their mutual relations.  But then each party keeps its professors of intimidation and stainers of character, whose business it is to deprive men of the luxury of large thinking, and to drive all neutrals into their respective ranks.  The missiles hurled from one side are disorganizer, infidel, disunionist, despiser of law, and other trumpery of that sort; from the other side, the no less effective ones of murderer, dumb dog, traitor to humanity, and other trumpery of that sort; and the young and sensitive student finds it difficult to keep the poise of his nature amid the cross-fire of this logic of fury and rhetoric of execration, and too often ends in joining one party from fear, or the other from the fear of being thought afraid.  The probability is, that the least danger to his mental independence will proceed from any apprehension he may entertain of what are irreverently styled the “old fogies”; for if Young America goes on at its present headlong rate, there is little doubt that the old fogy will have to descend from his eminence of place, become an object of pathos rather than terror, and be compelled to make the inquiring appeal to his brisk hunters, so often made to himself in vain, “Am I not a man and a brother?” But with whatever association, political or moral, the thinker may connect himself, let him go in,—­and not be dragged in or scared in.  He certainly can do no good to himself, his country, or his race, by being the slave and echo of the heads of a clique.  Besides, as most organizations are constituted on the principles of a sort of literary socialism, and each member lives and trades on a common capital of phrases, there is danger that these phrases may decline from signs into substitutes of thought, and both intellect and character evaporate in words.  Thus, a man may be a Union man and a National man, or an Anti-Slavery man and a Temperance man and a Woman’s-Rights’ man, and still be very little of a man.  There is, indeed, no more ludicrous sight than to see Mediocrity, perched on one of these resounding adjectives, strut and bluster, and give itself braggadocio airs, and dictate to all quiet men its maxims of patriotism or morality, and all the while be but a living illustration through what grandeurs of opinion essential meanness and poverty of soul will peer and peep and be disclosed.  To be a statesman or reformer requires a courage that dares defy dictation from any quarter, and a mind which has come in direct contact with the great inspiring ideas of country and humanity.  All the rest is spite, and spleen; and cant, and conceit, and words.