The present educational situation
in England is only another expression of that same prejudice in favor of
the established order, which finds expression in the merchant on the
Piccadilly omnibus.

Whenever you pass from one country to another you will find this
difference in tendencies to action. In Germany, for example, you will
find something that amounts almost to a national fervor for economy and
frugality. You will find it expressing itself in the care with which the
German housewife does her marketing. You will find it expressing itself
in the intensive methods of agriculture, through which scarcely a square
inch of arable land is permitted to lie fallow,--through which, for
example, even the shade trees by the roadside furnish fruit as well as
shade, and are annually rented for their fruit value to industrious
members of the community,--and it is said in one section of Germany that
the only people known to steal fruit from these trees along the lonely
country roads are American tourists, who, you will see, also have their
peculiar standards of conduct. You will find this same fervor for
frugality and economy expressing itself most extensively in that
splendid forest policy by means of which the German states have
conserved their magnificent timber resources.

But, whatever its expression, it is the same trait,--a trait born of
generations of struggle with an unyielding soil, and yet a trait which,
combined with the German fervor for science and education, has made
possible the marvelous progress that Germany has made within the last
half century.

What do we mean by national traits? Simply this: prejudices or
tendencies toward certain typical forms of conduct, common to a given
people. It is this community of conduct that constitutes a nation. A
country whose people have different standards of action must be a
divided country, as our own American history sufficiently demonstrates.
Unless upon the vital questions of human adjustment, men are able to
agree, they cannot live together in peace. If we are a distinctive and
unique nation,--if we hold a distinctive and unique place among the
nations of the globe,--it is because you and I and the other inhabitants
of our country have developed distinctive and unique ideals and
prejudices and standards, all of which unite to produce a community of
conduct. And once granting that our national characteristics are worth
while, that they constitute a distinct advance over