We need be at no loss to discover the effects of the combined influences here stated. The ordinary phrases of our country-people denote an 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 the man the better for it. He is interested in you;--that is the simple secret of all. King Carlyle calls us "eighteen millions of bores." To be sure; is that so bad? The primitive English element was pirate; let the primitive American _be_ bore. The fathers of the Britain that is took men by the throat; let the fathers of the America