Modern American Prose Selections | Page 6

gathered the peoples of the earth. We are the "heirs of all the ages." Our inheritance of tradition is greater than that of any other people, for we trace back not alone to King John signing the Magna Charta in that little stone hut by the riverside, but to Brutus standing beside the slain C?sar, to Charles Martel with his battle-axe raised against the advancing horde of an old-world civilization, to Martin Luther declaring his square-jawed policy of religious liberty, to Columbus in the prow of his boat crying to his disheartened crew, "Sail on, sail on, and on!" Irishman, Greek, Slav, and Sicilian--all the nations of the world have poured their hopes and their history into this great melting pot, and the product will be--in fact, is--a civilization that is new in the sense that it is the blend of many, and yet is as old as the Egyptians.
Surely the real tradition of such a people is not any one way of doing a certain thing; certainly not any set and unalterable plan of procedure in affairs, nor even any fixed phrase expressive of a general philosophy unless it comes from the universal heart of this strange new people. Why are we here? What is our purpose? These questions will give you the tradition of the American people, our supreme tradition--the one into which all others fall, and a part of which they are--the right of man to oppose injustice. There follow from this the right of man to govern himself, the right of property and to personal liberty, the right to freedom of speech, the right to make of himself all that nature will permit, the right to be one of many in creating a national life that will realize those hopes which singly could not be achieved.
Is there any other tradition so sacred as this--so much a part of ourselves--this hatred of injustice? It carries in its bosom all the past that inspires our people. Their spirit of unrest under wrong has lighted the way for the nations of the world. It is not seen alone in Kansas and in California, but in England, where a Liberal Ministry has made a beginning at the restoration of the land to the people; in Germany, where the citizen is fighting his way up to power; in Portugal, where a university professor sits in the chair a king so lately occupied; in Russia, emerging from the Middle Ages, with her groping Douma; in Persia, from which young Shuster was so recently driven for trying to give to a people a sense of national self-respect; in India, where an Emperor moves a national capital to pacify submerged discontent; and even in far Cathay, the mystery land of Marco Polo, immobile, phlegmatic, individualistic China, men have been waging war for the philosophy incorporated in the first ten lines of our Declaration of Independence.
Here is the effect of a tradition that is real, not a mere group of words or a well-fashioned bit of governmental machinery--real because it is ours; it has come out of our life; for the only real traditions a people have are those beliefs that have become a part of them, like the good manners of a gentleman. They are really our sympathies--sympathies born of experience. Subjectively they give standpoint; objectively they furnish background--a rich, deep background like that of some master of light and shade, some Rembrandt, whose picture is one great glowing mystery of darkness save in a central spot of radiant light where stands a single figure or group which holds the eye and enchants the imagination. History may give to us the one bright face to look upon, but in the deep mystery of the background the real story is told; for therein, to those who can see, are the groping multitudes feeling their way blindly toward the light of self-expression.
Now, this is a western view of tradition; it is yours, too; it was yours first; it was your gift to us. And is it impertinent to ask, when your sensibilities are shocked at some departure from the conventional in our western law, that you search the tradition of your own history to know in what spirit and by what method the gods of the elder days met the wrongs they wished to right? It may be that we ask too many questions; that we are unwilling to accept anything as settled; that we are curious, distrustful, and as relentlessly logical as a child.
For what are we but creatures of the night Led forth by day, Who needs must falter, and with stammering steps Spell out our paths in syllables of pain?
There are no grown-ups in this new world of democracy. We are trying an experiment such as the world has never seen. Here we