The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 6, December 1863 | Page 7

most markedly of all, comes mostly from what we call the
National Tradition. Some people call it Public Opinion. They think they
can even make it. They suppose it belongs to the present. In fact, they
cannot make it to any extent at all. It belongs to the past. It is a thing
inherited. It is best to call it National Tradition.
For the nation, being an organism, and living, its life does not end with
one generation. The river flows to-day, and is the same river it was a
thousand years ago, though every wave and every drop has changed a
million times. So the generations heave on into the great sea and are
forgotten, but the Nation abides the same. So all the thought, and
feeling, and conviction of the Nation to-day, on questions of human life
and duty, it brings from the far-away past, from the gray mists of the
distant hills where it took its rise.
Just think! The life of every great, strong man and woman, who has
lived, thought, worked in the Nation, has it not entered into the Nation's
life? Is not here yet, a part of the Nation's influence? Every great,
distinct type of human nature grown in the Nation becomes forever a
mould in which to cast men. Every great deed done, every strong
thought uttered, every noble life lived, is committed to the stream of
this national tradition. Every great victory won, every terrible defeat
suffered, every grand word spoken, every noble song sung, is alive to
the last. The living Nation drops nothing, loses nothing out of its life.
The Saxon Alfred, the Norman William, Scandinavian viking, moss

trooper of the border, they have all gone into our circulation, they all
help to shape Americans. And we have added Washington, the stainless
gentleman, and Jefferson, the unselfish statesman, and Franklin, the
patient conqueror of circumstance, and a thousand others, as types by
which to form the children of this people for a thousand years.
Think, too, how the national tradition rejects all bad models, all mean
types, how it refuses to touch them at any price, how it will only carry
down the grand models, the noble types. Arnold never enters as an
influence into national training. The Arnolds and their treason are
whelmed and sunk, as the Davises and their treason will be. The
Washingtons do live as types. Their deeds sweep on, like stately barks,
borne proudly on the rolling waves of the Nation's life, with triumphal
music on their snowy decks, the land's glory for evermore! Only the
noble, only the good, the true in some shape, never the utterly false or
vile, will this national tradition hold and keep, as an influence and a
power for time.
Unseen, unfelt, but strong like God's hand, this power surrounds the
cradle of the child. He finds it waiting for him. He does not know about
it or reason about it. It takes him, soft and plastic as it finds him, and
calls out his powers, and fashions them after its own forms. Before he
is twenty-one he is made up for good and all, an American, an
Englishman, or a Frenchman, for life. The creating influence was like
the air. He breathed it into his circulation.
There are people who think it very wise to quarrel with this state of
things. They think it philosophic to sneer at national prejudices, as they
call them, to call national pride and national feeling narrow and bigoted.
It is simply very silly to quarrel with any divine and unalterable order
of life. Better work under it and with it. Does not love of country exalt
and ennoble, and all the more because of its prejudices? Does not the
very meanest feel himself higher, more worthy, more self-respecting,
because he is one of a strong, great, free people, with a grand
inheritance of heroism from the past, and grand possibilities for the
future? Who will quarrel with the Frenchman, the Englishman, or the
Japanese, for holding his land the fairest land, his nation the noblest

nation the sun shines on? Is it not my fixed faith that he is utterly
deluded? Do I not know that my own land is the garden of the Lord?
Do I not see that its valleys are the holiest, and its mountains the
loftiest, its rivers the most majestic, and its seas the broadest, its men
the bravest, and its women the purest and fairest on the broad earth's
face? Even Fourth of July orations have their uses.
No! thank Heaven for this virtue of patriotism! It lifts a man out of his
lower nature, and makes his heart beat with the hearts of heroes. There
are two or three things in the world men will die