One element in this education by tradition was specially important. Liberalism, the principle upon which this republic was founded, education took up as soon as it dropped theology, if not earlier. American education became impregnated with liberalism, made liberalism its chief tradition. What we study in school and college stays by us, overlaid perhaps, scarcely vital any more, yet packed close to the roots of our conscious being. And the compost they gave us in America was liberalism. History enshrined the republican ideals of our founders and the democratic ideals of our nineteenth-century development. Sometimes it was taught in college classes with “sources” duly ticketed. Sometimes it trickled through commencement speeches or primers thumbed on back-row benches. The results were the same. In literature, whether English or American, the same ideas were predominant, or at least were made to seem so by careful selection. Democracy and the rights of man blow through the reading of the American school-boy, somewhat aridly it must be admitted; but still they blow. Civics and government and the social sciences in these latter days, as they are taught in America, advance the same standard. Not less definite and persuasive was the influence of the men who taught us. Many of them have been aristocratic in taste and in their misprision of the stupidities of the common man, but their text also was of liberalism and democracy whenever the subject or the occasion permitted. Even geography and spelling were presented as the means whereby the child of the laboring man had been given his chance to rise in the world and perhaps become President. Properly considered, the things we have been taught, the men who taught us, the very organization of our school and college system, have been one vast engine for shaping the minds of young America in the turn and mold of liberalism. But this liberalism, like most of our education, was highly traditional. Our subjects and the men who taught them looked prevailingly backward for inspiration, recalled us to the past, warned us of the future. The urge was always the old Roman one--preserve the piety of your ancestors. Preparation for new conditions, for a possible new liberty in industry or politics, for a possible new democracy in wealth, there was, we must confess, very little. We were linked to tradition; we were made profoundly and sincerely liberal, at least in our theories of life; we were implored to stand pat. And though education, as the art was practised here in America, has perhaps kept us liberal, it has certainly given to liberalism that faint shadow of unreality, that sacrosanctity which belongs to all traditional beliefs. It is the traditional quality of American education that more than any other single agency has petrified American liberalism.