but thinly scattered among mankind, and find only here
and there a fitness of reception. But prejudice, like the spider,
makes every where its home. It has neither taste nor choice of place,
and all that it requires is room. There is scarcely a situation,
except fire or water, in which a spider will not live. So, let the
mind be as naked as the walls of an empty and forsaken tenement,
gloomy as a dungeon, or ornamented with the richest abilities of
thinking; let it be hot, cold, dark, or light, lonely or inhabited,
still prejudice, if undisturbed, will fill it with cobwebs, and live,
like the spider, where there seems nothing to live on. If the one
prepares her food by poisoning it to her palate and her use, the other
does the same; and as several of our passions are strongly charactered
by the animal world, prejudice may be denominated the spider of the
mind.

Perhaps no two events ever united so intimately and forceably to
combat and expel prejudice, as the Revolution of America, and the
Alliance with France. Their effects are felt, and their influence
already extends as well to the old world as the new. Our style and
manner of thinking have undergone a revolution, more extraordinary
than the political revolution of the country. We see with other eyes;
we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we
formerly used. We can look back on our own prejudices, as if they had
been the prejudices of other people. We now see and know they were
prejudices, and nothing else; and relieved from their shackles, enjoy
a freedom of mind we felt not before. It was not all the argument,
however powerful, nor all the reasoning, however elegant, that could
have produced this change, so necessary to the extension of the mind
and the cordiality of the world, without the two circumstances of the
Revolution and the Alliance.

Had America dropt quietly from Britain, no material change in
sentiment had taken place. The same notions, prejudices, and conceits,
would have governed in both countries, as governed them before; and,
still the slaves of error and education, they would have travelled on
in the beaten tract of vulgar and habitual thinking. But brought about
by the means it has been, both with regard to ourselves, to France,
and to England, every corner of the mind is swept of its cobwebs,
poison, and dust, and made fit for the reception of general happiness.

Perhaps there never was an alliance on a broader basi