ighting and dying for one's
country as a supreme good while inculcating also that working and living
for oneself is quite within the sphere of virtuous action. It adores the
flag but suspects the State. One sees more national flags and fewer
national servants in America than in any country in the world. Its
conception of manners is one of free plain-spoken men revering women and
shielding them from most of the realities of life, scornful of
aristocracies and monarchies, while asserting simply, directly, boldly
and frequently an equal claim to consideration with all other men. If
there is any traditional national costume, it is shirt-sleeves. And it
cherishes the rights of property above any other right whatsoever.

Such are the details that come clustering into one's mind in response to
the phrase, the American tradition.

From the War of Independence onward until our own times that tradition,
that very definite ideal, has kept pretty steadily the same. It is the
image of a man and not the image of a State. Its living spirit has been
the spirit of freedom at any cost, unconditional and irresponsible. It
is the spirit of men who have thrown off a yoke, who are jealously
resolved to be unhampered masters of their "own," to whom nothing else
is of anything but secondary importance. That was the spirit of the
English small gentry and mercantile class, the comfortable property
owners, the Parliamentarians, in Stuart times. Indeed even earlier, it
is very largely the spirit of More's "Utopia." It was that spirit sent
Oliver Cromwell himself packing for America, though a heedless and
ill-advised and unforeseeing King would not let him go. It was the
spirit that made taxation for public purposes the supreme wrong and
provoked each country, first the mother country and then in its turn the
daughter country, to armed rebellion. It has been the spirit of the
British Whig and the British Nonconformist almost up to the present day.
In the Reform Club of London, framed and glazed over against Magna
Charta, is the American Declaration of Independence, kindred trophies
they are of the same essentially English spirit of stubborn
insubordination. But the American side of it has gone on unchecked by
the complementary aspect of the English character which British Toryism
expresses.

The War of Independence raised that Whig suspicion of and hostility to
government and the freedom of private property and the repudiation of
any but volunta