The mental and moral gloom of such homes hung destructively, appallingly over children. The very architecture taught them their first bad lessons. Lifted in their nurse's or mother's arms, they peered from parapet down upon drawbridge and moat--at danger. At the entrances they saw massive doors built to shut out death, perhaps battle-hacked, blood-stained. From these they learned violence and the habit of killing. Trap-doors taught them treachery. Sliding-panels in walls taught them cunning, flight, and cowardice, eaves-dropping. Underground dungeons taught them revenge, cruelty, persecution to the death: they might look down into one and see lying there some victim of slow starvation or slow torture. Nearly every leading vicious trait born in them seized upon the house itself for development, and began to clamber up its walls as naturally as castle ivy. Little children of the Dark Ages!--does any one now ever try to enter into their terrors and troubles and warped souls? Can any one conceivably nowadays look out upon human life or up to the heavens through their vision! When the Anglo-Saxon, heaven's blue in his eyes, sunlight in his hair, the conquest of the future in his brain, the peopling of the future in his loins, breasted fresh waters and reached the distant shore, he had come to a great land where he could build for the best that was in him. The story of the black slave fleeing across a Western river from a slave state into a free state, thrilling millions in this country, is as nothing to the story of the White Slave of the Ages who escaped across an ocean into a world where he became a free man. The cabins of this New World became the nurseries of a new kind of childhood on the earth. There is no possibility of measuring the effect upon a child and upon the man he is to be even of a door that has no lock and of windows that have no shutters. It was while sleeping behind such undefended doors and windows that the gaunt mated lions and lionesses on the Western frontiers of this Republic bred in chaste passion their lean cubs. Out of such a cabin without a bolt and with its mere latchstring there walked forth a new type of American man, the Nation's man, who as a child had trusted the open door in his father's house, and as a man trusted the door of humanity: nor had within himself secret nor secrecy, nor trick nor guile, nor double-dealing nor cruelty, nor vindictiveness nor revenge--the naked American, unpollutable iron of its strength and honor, Child of the New Childhood, Man of the New Manhood, with the great silence in him that is in the Great.