What I have tried to say is that the tradition of a nation is not a dead thing, locked in the past. It is a living thing, operating on the present. A tradition is a shared experience, governing present life. The State needs to cohere and find itself and establish a cultural consciousness, blended from manifold contributions. It is destructive to have new swirling elements ceaselessly driving through the mass. So I have protested against the too ready and ruthless discarding of the cultural consciousness bequeathed us by the older American stock. While the ideas imbedded in that consciousness will never again be in sole command, I believe that they should be more potent than they are to-day. I believe that politically they have a living value for us, and that we persistently underestimate the English contribution to freedom and justice. I deny that my desire that these ideas shall prevail is an attempt to locate the Garden of Eden and Paradise in the smoky past. It is, instead, the wish to see our country appropriate a particular political contribution from the English stock, exactly as it needs to appropriate certain social values from the Italians and the Greeks, and many very definite spiritual ideas from the culture of the Jews. What is the solution of these diverse elements? What blend can we obtain from a score of mixtures? How fashion a civilization that shall absorb and assimilate those blood-strains and traditional beliefs? I think the one clear answer lies in the creation of free institutions, which shall answer a common need, and which shall violate the instinctive life and traditions of none. Those free institutions will be the product of education, legislation, Coöperation, Trades Unionism and Syndicalism, municipal and State ownership, and widely spread private ownership and enterprise. The organized State under democratic control will be the thing aimed at. But these free institutions must gradually extend over areas far wider than vocational training and economic well-being. They should seek to offer free expression to the fully-functioning mind in art, science, ethics and religion. In this way they will give a good life. We have the shadowy beginnings of such institutions in the public school and library. But we have nothing like the Danish or English coöperative movement. Our institution of property affords us nothing like true peasant proprietorship of Ireland.