ual interest in itself.

To conclude. It seems to me that tradition has much less influence of an
authoritative kind than it had formerly, and that the authority which it
still possesses is everywhere steadily declining; that as a guide to
the future of the world it is more likely to mislead than to enlighten
us, and still that all intellectual and educated people must always take
a great interest in tradition, and have a certain sentiment of respect
for it. Consider what our feelings are towards the Church of Rome, the
living embodiment of tradition. No well-informed person can forget the
immense services that in former ages she has rendered to European
civilization, and yet at the same time such a person would scarcely wish
to place modern thought under her direction, nor would he consult the
Pope about the tendencies of the modern world. When in 1829 the city of
Warsaw erected a monument to Copernicus, a scientific society there
waited in the Church of the Holy Cross for a service that was to have
added solemnity to their commemoration. They waited vainly. Not a single
priest appeared. The clergy did not feel authorized to countenance a
scientific discovery which, in a former age, had been condemned by the
authority of the Church. This incident is delicately and accurately
typical of the relation between the modern and the traditional spirit.
The modern spirit is not hostile to tradition, and would not object to
receive any consecration which tradition might be able to confer, but
there are difficulties in bringing the two elements together.

We need not, however, go so far as Warsaw, or back to the year 1829,
for examples of an unwillingness on the part of the modern mind to break
entirely with the traditional spirit. Our own country is remarkable both
for the steadiness of its advance towards a future widely different from
the past, and for an affectionate respect for the ideas and institutions
that it gradually abandons, as it is forced out of them by new
conditions of existence, I may mention, as one example out of very many,
our feeling about the reconstruction of the navy. Here is a matter in
which science has compelled us to break with tradition absolutely and
irrevocably; we have done so, but we have done so with the greatest
regret. The ships of the line that our hearts and imaginations love are
the ships of Nelson and Collingwood and Cochrane. We think of the
British fleets that bore down upon the enemy wit