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 syllable