Think, too, how the national tradition rejects all bad models, all mean types, how it refuses to touch them at any price, how it will only carry down the grand models, the noble types. Arnold never enters as an influence into national training. The Arnolds and their treason are whelmed and sunk, as the Davises and their treason will be. The Washingtons do live as types. Their deeds sweep on, like stately barks, borne proudly on the rolling waves of the Nation's life, with triumphal music on their snowy decks, the land's glory for evermore! Only the noble, only the good, the true in some shape, never the utterly false or vile, will this national tradition hold and keep, as an influence and a power for time. Unseen, unfelt, but strong like God's hand, this power surrounds the cradle of the child. He finds it waiting for him. He does not know about it or reason about it. It takes him, soft and plastic as it finds him, and calls out his powers, and fashions them after its own forms. Before he is twenty-one he is made up for good and all, an American, an Englishman, or a Frenchman, _for life_. The creating influence was like the air. He breathed it into his circulation. There are people who think it very wise to quarrel with this state of things. They think it philosophic to sneer at national prejudices, as they call them, to call national pride and national feeling narrow and bigoted. It is simply very silly to quarrel with any divine and unalterable order of life. Better work under it and with it. Does not love of country exalt and ennoble, and all the more because of its prejudices? Does not the very meanest feel himself higher, more worthy, more self-respecting, because he is one of a strong, great, free people, with a grand inheritance of heroism from the past, and grand possibilities for the future? Who will quarrel with the Frenchman, the Englishman, or the Japanese, for holding his land the fairest land, his nation the noblest nation the sun shines on? Is it not my fixed faith that he is utterly deluded? Do I not _know_ that my own land is the garden of the Lord? Do I not see that its valleys are the holiest, and its mountains the loftiest, its rivers the most majestic, and its seas the broadest, its men the bravest, and its women the purest and fairest on the broad earth's face? Even Fourth of July orations have their uses.