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 from bosom, and rendering impossible that streaming
of heart-fires, that mounting flame from meeting brands, out of whose
wondrous baptism come the consecrate deeds of mankind. Go to China, and
to any living soul you obtain no access, or next to none,--such
disastrous roods of etiquette are interposed between. It is as if one
very cordially shook hands with you by means of a pair of tongs or a
ten-foot pole. Indeed, it is hardly a man that you meet; it is a piece