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 that is to be take them by the—button;—that is amelioration enough for one thousand years! In truth, this intense personal interest which characterizes the American, though often awkwardly manifested and troublesome, is an admirable feature in his constitution, and few traits should awaken our pride or expectation more. It is this keen fellow-feeling that fits him for the broadest and most beneficent public interest. This makes him a philanthropist. And his philanthropy is peculiar. It is not merely of the neighborhood sort, such as sends a Thanksgiving turkey to poor Robert and a hat that does not fit well to poor Peter. For here the predilection for principles and generalizations comes in, and leads him to translate his fellow-feeling into social axioms. Thus it occurs that the American is that man who is grappling most earnestly and intelligently with the problem of man's relation to man. In every village is some knot of active minds that brood over questions of this kind. The monarch newspaper of America is deeply tinged with the same hue; nor could one with a contrary complexion attain its position. This great current of human interest floats our politics; it feeds the springs of enthusiasm, coming forth in doctrines of non-resistance, of government by love, and the like; and our literature contains essays upon love and friendship which, in our judgment, are not equalled in the literature of the world.
Nor is a moral discipline wanting to second this tendency. A terrible social anomaly has been forced upon us,—has had time to intertwine itself with trade, with creeds, with partisan prejudice and patriotic pride, and, having become next to unconquerable, now shows that it can keep no terms and must kill or be killed. And through this the question of man's duties to man, on the broadest scale, is incessantly kept in agitation. It is like a lurid handwriting across the sky,—"Learn what man should be and do to his fellow." And the companion sentence is this,—"Thy justice to the strangers shall be the best security to thine own household."
By the co-working of these two grand tendencies we obtain at once the largest speculative breadth and the closest practical and personal interest. What sweeter promise could any one ask than that of this rare and admirable combination? Thought and action have been more than sufficiently separated. The philosopher has discoursed to a few, and in the dialect of the few, in Academic shades; sanctity has hidden itself away, lost in the joy of its secret contemplations; the great world has rolled by, unhearing, unheeding,—like London roaring with cataract thunder around St. Paul's, while within the choral service is performed to an audience of one. Thinking and doing have hardly recognized each other. Now we are not of those vague, enthusiastic persons who fancy that all truths are for all ears,—that the highest spiritual fact can be communicated, where there is no spiritual apprehension to lay hold upon it. He that hath ears, let him hear. Nor would we attempt to confuse the functions of sayer and doer. But let there be a sympathy and understanding between them, that, when achieved, will mark an epoch in the world's history. Nowhere, at least in modern times, have thought and action approached so nearly and intimately as in America; nowhere is speculative intellect so colored with the hues of practical interest without limiting its own flight; nowhere are labor and executive power so receptive of pure intellectual suggestion. The union of what is deepest and most recondite in thought with clear-sighted
