In at least two of these essays, those on “Debasing the Moral Currency” and “The Modern Hep, Hep, Hep!” she has newly expressed herself concerning tradition.  In the first she protests against the too-common custom of satirizing what is noble and venerable.  Our need of faith in the higher things of life is very great, and that faith is to be established only through our regard for what has been given us by those who have gone before us.  Whatever lowers our trust in the results of human efforts is corrupting, for it breaks down our faith in the true sources of human authority.  “This is what I call debasing the moral currency,” she says; “lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less of the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charm and elevation of our social existence—­the something besides bread by which man saves his soul alive.”  With her conception of tradition, as the legitimate source of the moral and spiritual life in man, and as the influence which builds up all which is truest and purest in our civilization, she can endure to see no contempt put upon its products.  This essay, more perhaps than anything else she wrote, gives an insight into her conception of the higher life and her total lack of faith in any idealistic sources of human motive or inspiration.  Contempt for the traditional, with her, implies contempt for the spiritual and moral.  To destroy the traditional is revolutionary, dangerous and immoral.  She cannot reject tradition in the name of higher wisdom, in the name of higher truth and authority.  It gone, and all is gone; hence her fear of all iconoclastic and revolutionary methods.  So she would keep whole and pure the national memories of every people.  In the last essay of the book she says, “The preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national greatness, and their revival a sign of reviving nationality.”  It is “the divine gift of memory” as it expresses itself in the life and purposes of a people, “which inspires the moments with a past, a present and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the brutes.”  All which lowers the influence or the sacredness of this memory is debasing.  The corrupting of this memory “is the impoverishment that threatens our posterity;” and this “new famine, a meagre fiend, with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a moral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments.”  That eager yearning of the nineteenth century for truth and reality, for something more than traditions and national memories, which displays itself in reforms and revolutions of every kind, had little of George Eliot’s sympathy.  Yet this spirit is stronger even than tradition, and creates for us a new world and a higher life.

Throughout these essays it is the social side of morality which is praised and commended.  What will increase the altruistic spirit, what will widen sympathy and helpfulness, is regarded as truly ethical in its import.  Ideal aims are brought to the level of present needs and the possibilities of human nature as it now exists.