When I speak of this vast multitude, these ninety millions of the United States of America as being for the most part peasants de-peasant-ised and common people cut off from their own social traditions, I do not intend to convey that the American community is as a whole traditionless.  There is in America a very distinctive tradition indeed, which animates the entire nation, gives a unique idiom to its press and all its public utterances, and is manifestly the starting point from which the adjustments of the future must be made.

The mere sight of the stars and stripes serves to recall it; “Yankee” in the mouth of a European gives something of its quality.  One thinks at once of a careless abandonment of any pretension, of tireless energy and daring enterprise, of immense self-reliance, of a disrespect for the past so complete that a mummy is in itself a comical object, and the blowing out of an ill-guarded sacred flame, a delightful jest.  One thinks of the enterprise of the sky-scraper and the humour of “A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur,” and of “Innocents Abroad.”  Its dominant notes are democracy, freedom, and confidence.  It is religious-spirited without superstition consciously Christian in the vein of a nearly Unitarian Christianity, fervent but broadened, broadened as a halfpenny is broadened by being run over by an express train, substantially the same, that is to say, but with a marked loss of outline and detail.  It is a tradition of romantic concession to good and inoffensive women and a high development of that personal morality which puts sexual continence and alcoholic temperance before any public virtue.  It is equally a tradition of sporadic emotional public-spiritedness, entirely of the quality of gallantry, of handsome and surprising gifts to the people, disinterested occupation of office and the like.  It is emotionally patriotic, hypotheticating fighting 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.