unsparing logic of the rod, that the law of
life is not self-will. Some of us, possibly, remember those emphatic
lessons yet.

It is hard, however, to learn this thing perfectly. And so after the
Mother, Father, and Teacher get through, the Nation takes up the lesson.
A wise, wide, unselfish will takes command, and puts down the narrow,
conceited, selfish will of the individual. The individual will may think
itself very wise and very right. But the large will, the broad, strong,
wise will of the Nation, comes and says: 'Here is the _Law_, the
embodiment of the great, wide, wise will, to which the wisest and the
strongest must submit and bow.'

That is the law of human position. Not self-will but obedience, not
anarchy but order, not mad uncontrolledness, but calm submission, even
to temporary error and wrong, is the road to ultimate perfection.
Therefore, we can say nothing too reverential of Law. We cannot guard
too jealously the clear trumpet-tongued preacher of everlasting right,
sounding out a great Nation's convictions of obligation and duty. Hedge
its sanctity with a ring wall of fire. Reverence the voice of the land
for right and order. We have exploded forever, let us trust, the notion
of 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong.' We must cling,
therefore, with tenfold tenacity to the right divine of Law, the Sacred
Majesty of the Nation's settled Order.

But the Written Law is only one way in which the Nation brings its
teachings home to the individual. It is not the strongest way. The
Nation's most powerful formative influence lies in its _traditions_, its
unwritten law, its sense and feeling about the questions of human life
and conduct, handed down from father to son in the continuity of the
national life. And the power to hand these down depends on the fact that
the Nation is a living organism.

For examine, and you will find every nation has a power to mould men
after a certain model. We are Americans because we have been made so by
the national influence. Rome, in old time, moulded men after a certain
type, and, with infinite small diversities, made them all Romans. Greece
took them, and, on another model, made them Greeks. England has the
artistic power, and kneads the clay of childhood into the grown up
creature the world knows as an Englishman. France has the same power,
and manufactures the Frenchman.

Now this moulding power, which every nation has, and the greatest
nations the most markedly