For examine, and you will find every nation has a power to mould men after a certain model. We are Americans because we have been made so by the national influence. Rome, in old time, moulded men after a certain type, and, with infinite small diversities, made them all Romans. Greece took them, and, on another model, made them Greeks. England has the artistic power, and kneads the clay of childhood into the grown up creature the world knows as an Englishman. France has the same power, and manufactures the Frenchman. Now this moulding power, which every nation has, and the greatest nations the most markedly of all, comes mostly from what we call the National Tradition. Some people call it Public Opinion. They think they can even make it. They suppose it belongs to the present. In fact, they cannot make it to any extent at all. It belongs to the past. It is a thing inherited. It is best to call it National Tradition. For the nation, being an organism, and living, its life does not end with one generation. The river flows to-day, and is the same river it was a thousand years ago, though every wave and every drop has changed a million times. So the generations heave on into the great sea and are forgotten, but the Nation abides the same. So all the thought, and feeling, and conviction of the Nation to-day, on questions of human life and duty, it brings from the far-away past, from the gray mists of the distant hills where it took its rise. Just think! The life of every great, strong man and woman, who has lived, thought, worked in the Nation, has it not entered into the Nation's life? Is not here yet, a part of the Nation's influence? Every great, distinct type of human nature grown in the Nation becomes forever a mould in which to cast men. Every great deed done, every strong thought uttered, every noble life lived, is committed to the stream of this national tradition. Every great victory won, every terrible defeat suffered, every grand word spoken, every noble song sung, is alive to the last. The living Nation drops nothing, loses nothing out of its life. The Saxon Alfred, the Norman William, Scandinavian viking, moss trooper of the border, they have all gone into our circulation, they all help to shape Americans. And we have added Washington, the stainless gentleman, and Jefferson, the unselfish statesman, and Franklin, the patient conqueror of circumstance, and a thousand others, as types by which to form the children of this people for a thousand years.