Another impression was—­indeed the impression carried with me all the summer—­the thought already suggested, the brotherhood of man.  The fact is that the differences are so small between nations that they may be said to be all alike.  Though I spent the most of the summer in silence, I spoke a few times and to people of different nations, and how soon I noticed that they were very much alike!  If a man knows how to play the piano, it does not make any difference whether he finds it in New Orleans or San Francisco or Boston or St. Petersburg or Moscow or Madras; it has so many keys, and he puts his fingers right on them.  And the human heart is a divine instrument, with just so many keys in all cases, and you strike some of them and there is joy, and you strike some of them and there is sorrow.  Plied by the same motives, lifted up by the same success, depressed by the same griefs.  The cab-men of London have the same characteristics as the cab-men of New York, and are just as modest and retiring.  The gold and silver drive Piccadilly and the Boulevards just as they drive Wall Street.  If there be a great political excitement in Europe, the Bourse in Paris howls just as loudly as ever did the American gold-room.

The same grief that we saw in our country in 1864 you may find now in the military hospitals of England containing the wounded and sick from the Egyptian wars.  The same widowhood and orphanage that sat down in despair after the battles of Shiloh and South Mountain poured their grief in the Shannon and the Clyde and the Dee and the Thames.  Oh, ye men and women who know how to pray, never get up from your knees until you have implored God in behalf of the fourteen hundred millions of the race just like yourselves, finding life a tremendous struggle!  For who knows but that as the sun to-day draws up drops of water from the Caspian and the Black seas and from the Amazon and the Mississippi, after a while to distill the rain, these very drops on the fields—­who knows but that the sun of righteousness may draw up the tears of your sympathy, and then rain them down in distillation of comfort o’er all the world?

Who is that poor man, carried on a stretcher to the Afghan ambulance?  He is your brother.  If in the Pantheon at Paris you smite your hand against the wall among the tombs of the dead, you will hear a very strange echo coming from all parts of the Pantheon just as soon as you smite the wall.  And I suppose it is so arranged that every stroke of sorrow among the tombs of bereavement ought to have loud, long, and oft-repeated echoes of sympathy all around the world.  Oh, what a beautiful theory it is—­and it is a Christian theory—­that Englishman, Scotchman, Irishman, Norwegian, Frenchman, Italian, Russian, are all akin.  Of one blood all nations.  That is a very beautiful inscription that I saw a few days ago over the door in Edinburgh, the door of the house where John Knox used to live.  It is getting somewhat dim now, but there is the inscription, fit for the door of any household—­“Love God above all, and your neighbor as yourself.”