There is, truly, a momentous difference in this regard between modern and mediæval life, but to call it a change from tradition to convention does not, I think, indicate its real character. Indeed, tradition and convention are by no means the separate and opposite things they may appear to be when we look at them in their most contrasted phases. It would be strange if there were any real separation between ideas coming from the past and those coming from contemporaries, since they exist in the same public mind. A traditional usage is also a convention within the group where it prevails. One learns it from other people and conforms to it by imitation and the desire not to be singular, just as he does to any other convention. The quaint local costume that still prevails in out-of-the-way corners of Europe is worn for the same reasons, no doubt, that the equally peculiar dress-suit and silk hat are worn by sophisticated people the world over; one convention is simply more extended than the other. In old times the conforming group, owing to the difficulty of intercourse, was small. People were eager to be in the fashion, as they are now, but they knew nothing of fashions beyond their own locality. Modern traditions are conventional on a larger scale. The Monroe Doctrine, to take a dignified example, is a tradition, regarded historically, but a convention as to the manner in which it enters into contemporary opinion. In a similar manner we may see that conventions must also be traditions. The new fashions are adaptations of old ones, and there are no really new ideas of any sort, only a gradual transformation of those that have come down from the past. In a large view, then, tradition and convention are merely aspects of the transmission of thought and of the unity of social groups that results from it. If our mind is fixed upon the historical phase of the matter we see tradition, if upon the contemporary phase we see convention. But the process is really one, and the opposition only particular and apparent. All influences are contemporary in their immediate origin, all are rooted in the past. What is it, then, that makes the difference between an apparently traditional society, such as that of mediæval Europe, and an apparently conventional society, like that of our time? Simply that the conditions are such as to make one of these phases more obvious than the other. In a comparatively small and stable group, continuous in the same locality and having little intercourse with the world outside, the fact that ideas come from tradition is evident; they pass down from parents to children as visibly as physical traits. Convention, however, or the action of contemporary intercourse, is on so small a scale as to be less apparent; the length and not the breadth of the movement attracts the eye.