the walls of an empty and forsaken tenement, gloomy as a dungeon, or ornamented with the richest abilities of thinking; let it be hot, cold, dark, or light, lonely or inhabited, still prejudice, if undisturbed, will fill it with cobwebs, and live, like the spider, where there seems nothing to live on.  If the one prepares her food by poisoning it to her palate and her use, the other does the same; and as several of our passions are strongly charactered by the animal world, prejudice may be denominated the spider of the mind.

Perhaps no two events ever united so intimately and forceably to combat and expel prejudice, as the Revolution of America, and the Alliance with France.  Their effects are felt, and their influence already extends as well to the old world as the new.  Our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution, more extraordinary than the political revolution of the country.  We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used.  We can look back on our own prejudices, as if they had been the prejudices of other people.  We now see and know they were prejudices, and nothing else; and relieved from their shackles, enjoy a freedom of mind we felt not before.  It was not all the argument, however powerful, nor all the reasoning, however elegant, that could have produced this change, so necessary to the extension of the mind and the cordiality of the world, without the two circumstances of the Revolution and the Alliance.

Had America dropt quietly from Britain, no material change in sentiment had taken place.  The same notions, prejudices, and conceits, would have governed in both countries, as governed them before; and, still the slaves of error and education, they would have travelled on in the beaten tract of vulgar and habitual thinking.  But brought about by the means it has been, both with regard to ourselves, to France, and to England, every corner of the mind is swept of its cobwebs, poison, and dust, and made fit for the reception of general happiness.

Perhaps there never was an alliance on a broader basis, than that between America and France, and the progress of it is worth attending to.  The countries had been enemies, not properly of themselves, but through the medium of England.  They, originally, had no quarrel with each other, nor any cause for one, but what arose from the interest of England, and her arming America against France.  At the same time, the Americans, at a distance from and unacquainted with the world, and tutored in all the prejudices which governed those who governed them, conceived it their duty to act as they were taught.  In doing this they expended their substance to make conquests, not for themselves, but for their masters, who in return, treated them as slaves.

A long succession of insolent severity, and the separation finally occasioned by the commencement of hostilities at Lexington, on the 19th of April, 1775, naturally produced a new disposition of thinking.  As the mind closed itself towards England, it opened itself toward the world; and our prejudices, like our oppressions, underwent, though less observed, a mental examination; until we found the former as inconsistent with reason and benevolence, as the latter were repugnant to our civil and political rights.