alert judgment,--as, "I reckon," "I calculate," "I guess."
The inventiveness which characterizes Americans, the multiplicity of
patents, comes from the tendency to go behind the actual, to test
possibilities, to bring everything to the standard of thought. Emerson
dissolves England in the alembic of his brain, and makes a thought of
that. Our politics are yearly becoming more and more questions of
principle, questions of right and wrong. There is almost infinite
promise and significance in this gradual victory of the moral over the
political, of life over mechanism. Mr. Benton complains of the
"speculative philanthropy" of New England, because it suggests
questions upon which he could not meet his constituents, and interferes
with his domestic arrangements. It is much as if one should pray God to
abolish the sun because his own eyes are sore!

* * * * *

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