e, just as they are now astonished, and will be increasingly
astonished, to find Poland or the Papacy or the French nation still
alive. And what I mean by Philadelphia and Baltimore being alive is
precisely what these people mean by their being dead; it is continuity;
it is the presence of the life first breathed into them and of the
purpose of their being; it is the benediction of the founders of the
colonies and the fathers of the republic. This tradition is truly to be
called life; for life alone can link the past and the future. It merely
means that as what was done yesterday makes some difference to-day, so
what is done to-day will make some difference to-morrow. In New York it
is difficult to feel that any day will make any difference. These
moderns only die daily without power to rise from the dead. But I can
truly claim that in coming into some of these more stable cities of the
States I felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion which
is satisfied in the eternal cities of the Mediterranean. I felt in
America what many Americans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I have
seldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than when I
saw from afar off, above the vast grey labyrinth of Philadelphia, great
Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioned
a new world; and remembered that his body lay buried in a field at the
turning of a lane, a league from my own door.

For this aspect of America is rather neglected in the talk about
electricity and headlines. Needless to say, the modern vulgarity of
avarice and advertisement sprawls all over Philadelphia or Boston; but
so it does over Winchester or Canterbury. But most people know that
there is something else to be found in Canterbury or Winchester; many
people know that it is rather more interesting; and some people know
that Alfred can still walk in Winchester and that St. Thomas at
Canterbury was killed but did not die. It is at least as possible for a
Philadelphian to feel the presence of Penn and Franklin as for an
Englishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and of Becket. Tradition does not
mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the
dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred
years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel
in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago. And these
things did and do matter. Quakerism is not my fav