Wanderers whom no God took knowledge of
  To give them laws, to fight for them, or blight
  Another race to make them ampler room;
  Who have no whence or whither in their souls,
  No dimmest lure of glorious ancestors
  To make a common breath for piety.

As his people are weak because they have no traditional life, he proposes by his deeds to make them national memories and hopes and aims.

                        No lure
  Shall draw me to disown them, or forsake
  The meagre wandering herd that lows for help—­
  And needs me for its guide, to seek my pasture
  Among the well-fed beeves that graze at will. 
  Because our race has no great memories,
  I will so live, it shall remember me
  For deeds of such divine beneficence
  As rivers have, that teach, men what is good
  By blessing them.  I have been schooled—­have caught
  Lore from Hebrew, deftness from the Moor—­
  Know the rich heritage, the milder life,
  Of nations fathered by a mighty Past.

The way in which such a past is made is suggested by Zarca, in answer to a question about the Gypsy’s faith; it is made by a common life of faith and brotherhood, that gives origin to a common inheritance and memories.

                           O, it is a faith
  Taught by no priest, but by their beating hearts
  Faith to each other:  the fidelity
  Of fellow-wanderers in a desert place
  Who share the same dire thirst, and therefore share
  The scanty water:  the fidelity
  Of men whose pulses leap with kindred fire,
  Who in the flash of eyes, the clasp of hands,
  The speech that even in lying tells the truth
  Of heritage inevitable as birth,
  Nay, in the silent bodily presence feel
  The mystic stirring of a common life
  Which makes the many one:  fidelity
  To that deep consecrating oath our sponsor Fate
  Made through our infant breath when we were born
  The fellow-heirs of that small island, Life,
  Where we must dig and sow and reap with brothers. 
  Fear thou that oath, my daughter—­nay, not fear,
  But love it; for the sanctity of oaths
  Lies not in lightning that avenges them,
  But in the injury wrought by broken bonds
  And in the garnered good of human trust. 
  And you have sworn—­even with your infant breath
  You too were pledged.

George Eliot’s faith in tradition, as furnishing the basis of our best life, and the moral purpose and law which is to guide it, she has concentrated into one question asked by Maggie Tulliver.

    If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie?  We should
    have no law but the inclination of the moment.