e, if I may so speak, been turning all your
front-head into back-head, giving to your cerebral powers the characters
of preappointed, automatic action, which are proper to the cerebellum.
It cannot be denied that you have thus acquired a remarkable,
machine-like simplicity, force, and constancy of mental action,--your
brain-wheels spinning away with such a steam-engine whirr as one cannot
but admire; but, on the other hand, as was inevitable, you have become
astonishingly insensitive to all truths, save those with which you are
established in organic connection; nor could the products of Manchester
mills be bargained for beforehand with more certainty than the results
of your intellectual activity. You can be silent,--I venture to assert
so much; but if you speak at all, we know perfectly well what
description of fabric _must_ come from your loom.

It does not, therefore, surprise us, does not clash with our sense of
your native greatness, that for our particular Iliad you prove a very
nutshell Homer indeed. For I must not disguise it from you that this is
exactly the case. It was _Homerus in nuce_ first; and the pitiful
purport of the epic results less from any smallness in the action
celebrated than from that important law, not, perhaps, wholly new to
your own observation, which forbids a pint-measure to contain more than
a pint, though you dip it full from the ocean itself.

You are great, but not towards us Americans. Towards us you are little
and insignificant and superfluous. Your eyes, though of wondrous
efficacy in their way, blink in our atmosphere like those of an owl in
broad sunlight; and if you come flying here, it is the privilege of the
smallest birds--of which you are quite at liberty to esteem me one--to
pester you back into your medieval twilight.

Shall I try to tell you why you can have no right to judge us and our
affairs? By your leave, then, and briefly.

There is a spiritual nature of man, which is ever and everywhere the
same; and, through the necessary presence of this in every human being,
there is a common sense and a common conscience, which make each man one
with all others. Here in America we are seeking to give the force of
political sovereignty to this common and unitive nature,--assuming that
all political problems are at last questions of simple justice, courage,
good sense, and fellow-feeling, which any sound heart and healthy
intelligence may appreciate.

On the other hand, ther