Patriotism (which is almost the religion of us moderns) is born of two parents, first, attachment to people and places dear to us from long association; second, attachment to a certain spirit which is the sum of the thought and action of the nation as a whole. In America, the comparative shortness of our national history and the nomadic life of so many of our people have combined to give local attachments a slighter hold than in Europe. On the other hand, the national spirit is correspondingly strong. From the beginning, every effort has been made to define, and thereby to intensify it. The nation consciously dates itself from the Declaration of Independence and, after that, from the adoption of the Federal Constitution. So powerful have these formulas been that in America, more than in any other country, it is possible to use almost interchangeably the words “national spirit” and “national doctrine.” It is true that the chief points of this national doctrine are that men have certain inherent, natural rights ... predominantly the right to “liberty,” that they are equal in those rights, and in all other matters touching the law. Obviously this implies for instance that no citizen or group of citizens should be empowered to compel their fellows either to consume or to refrain from any given sort of food or drink. On the other hand, the reverence paid to the written law, founded upon the Declaration and the Constitution, has resulted in widespread error as to the nature of law itself. The majestic formulas of the Declaration, and the governmental framework set forth in the Constitution, changed in no way the manners and customs of Americans. Their power was derived from the response which they roused in the rooted instinct of men of European stock. The underlying spirit of Christendom breathed life into them. Unhappily the mass of Americans, cut off as they were from tradition—first by their Protestantism and secondly by the Atlantic—instead of recognizing the traditional source from which the strength of their national formula was derived, mistakenly believed that strength to be derived from the fact that these formulas had been made the basis of American statute law. Instead of recognizing in statute law merely the ratification of established custom resulting from the sum of human activities, they erroneously came to believe that human activities could be compelled to conform to statutes merely because these statutes were proclaimed to have the force of law, and irrespective of the fundamental laws of human nature and inexorable human limitations which underlay those activities. “Men do not make the laws. They do but discover them,”[45] says Vice-President Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts. And in so saying he indicts one of the great failures of American thought.