Modern American Prose Selections | Page 6

We have traveled centuries and centuries since
then--measured in events, in achievements, in depth of insight into the
secrets of nature, in breadth of view, in sweep of sympathy, and in the
rise of ennobling hope. Physically we are to-day nearer to China than
we were then to Ohio. Socially, industrially, commercially the wide
world is almost a unit. And these thirteen states have spread across a
continent to which have been 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 Cæsar, 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