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 of automatic ceremony. Nor is it in China alone that men may be found who can hardly be accredited with proper personality. As one dying may distribute his property in legacies to various institutions and organizations,--so much, for example, to the Tract Society, so much to the Colonization Society, and the like,--in the same manner do many make wills at the outset of life for the disposal of their own personal powers, and do nothing afterward but execute this testament,--executing themselves in another sense at the same time. They parcel out themselves, their judgment, their conscience, and whatsoever pertains to their spiritual being, among the customs, traditions, institutions, etiquettes of their time, and renounce all claim to a free existence. After such a piece of spiritual _felo-de-se_, the man is nothing but one wheel in a machine, or even but one cog upon a wheel. Thenceforth he merely hangs together;--simple cohesion is the utmost approximation to action which can be truly attributed to him.