How few men we see use their authority to repair an error, punish a lie or any villainy whatsoever! Weakness, hesitation, doubt, lack of initiative, indifference, have taken the place of moral courage, and that through the lack of character-training. As Emerson says: “No change of circumstances can repair a fault of character.... What have I gained ... if I quake at opinion, the public opinion, as we call it; or at the threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbours, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumour of revolution, or of murder? If I quake, what matters it what I quake at?” Each of us, then, should in his own sphere of action become conscious of what is right, and not hesitate to struggle, even to the detriment of his private interests, against all false judgment attacking honour, every opinion concealing baseness, every action which is an insult to reason and to the liberty of the individual. TRADITIONS Tradition is a link of the present with the past, the transmitting of legendary memories from century to century--memories based on real facts, exaggerated or deformed by the popular mind in quest of the ideal. Traditions of pagan or religious essence are multiform. In most cases they denote blind reverence, unconscious veneration for creeds turned into customs; they are a sign of the passivity of the human mind, whose chief weakness is superstition. Whether as regards action or thought, tradition appeals to the special organisation of certain temperaments of a primitive order, or which are purely dogmatic. The desire to maintain tradition implies uncontrolled deference to custom together with the need for moral or sectarian order, and for this reason it is detrimental to the gradual change of thought on which progress depends. In all ages of the world, since the period when oral narration was handed down from generation to generation, traditions have been accepted as truths. Now, that which was truth at the exact moment when a certain thing occurred is no longer truth after a long lapse of time, because of changes with regard to the original fact and the false interpretations put upon it by the crowd. Locke says with much truth: “A man worthy of belief bringing testimony of a thing known to him affords a good proof; but if another man equally worthy of credence testifies on the report of that man, his witness is weaker; while that of a third who attests a hearsay is still less to be considered; so that in truths that come by tradition each degree of remoteness from the original source weakens the force of the proof; and in proportion as a tradition passes successively through more hands, it has ever less force and evidence.”