Whenever you pass from one country to another you will find this difference in tendencies to action.  In Germany, for example, you will find something that amounts almost to a national fervor for economy and frugality.  You will find it expressing itself in the care with which the German housewife does her marketing.  You will find it expressing itself in the intensive methods of agriculture, through which scarcely a square inch of arable land is permitted to lie fallow,—­through which, for example, even the shade trees by the roadside furnish fruit as well as shade, and are annually rented for their fruit value to industrious members of the community,—­and it is said in one section of Germany that the only people known to steal fruit from these trees along the lonely country roads are American tourists, who, you will see, also have their peculiar standards of conduct.  You will find this same fervor for frugality and economy expressing itself most extensively in that splendid forest policy by means of which the German states have conserved their magnificent timber resources.

But, whatever its expression, it is the same trait,—­a trait born of generations of struggle with an unyielding soil, and yet a trait which, combined with the German fervor for science and education, has made possible the marvelous progress that Germany has made within the last half century.

What do we mean by national traits?  Simply this:  prejudices or tendencies toward certain typical forms of conduct, common to a given people.  It is this community of conduct that constitutes a nation.  A country whose people have different standards of action must be a divided country, as our own American history sufficiently demonstrates.  Unless upon the vital questions of human adjustment, men are able to agree, they cannot live together in peace.  If we are a distinctive and unique nation,—­if we hold a distinctive and unique place among the nations of the globe,—­it is because you and I and the other inhabitants of our country have developed distinctive and unique ideals and prejudices and standards, all of which unite to produce a community of conduct.  And once granting that our national characteristics are worth while, that they constitute a distinct advance over the characteristics of the other nations of the earth, it becomes the manifest duty of the school to do its share in perpetuating these ideals and prejudices and standards.  Once let these atrophy through disuse, once let them fail of transmission because of the decay of the home, or the decay of the school, or the decay of the social institutions that typify and express them, and our country must go the way of Greece and Rome, and, although our blood may thereafter continue pure and unmixed, and our physical characteristics may be passed on from generation to generation unchanged in form, our nation will be only a memory, and its history ancient history.  Some of the Greeks of to-day are the lineal descendants of the Athenians and Spartans, but the ancient Greek standards of conduct, the Greek ideals, died twenty centuries ago, to be resurrected, it is true, by the renaissance, and to enjoy the glorious privilege of a new and wider sphere of life,—­but among an alien people, and under a northern sun.