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question, but I do want to emphasize the thought that because democracy is progressive it cannot be cabined, cribbed and confined within the narrow limits of any traditional policy. Blind adherence to tradition is not the highest patriotism, but is a form of intellectual slavery not worthy of a free and progressive people. An assumption that the teachings of our fathers expressed the finality of political wisdom is contradicted by the uniform experience of mankind. The Almighty never intended that wisdom should die either with one man, one generation, one race, one century, or one epoch. Least of any people should America doubt the "increasing purpose" of the ages, and the widening of thought "with the process of the suns." Our fathers recognized that wise nations, as wise individuals, change their minds when occasion justifies, but fools never. They, too, had their traditional policy of loyalty to the king, hatred of France, pride in the English empire, and disinclination towards any union between themselves. When the revolution broke out nothing was further from their purpose than separation from England. "Building better than they knew," as all master builders of a nation, our fathers were led, not by any conscious leadership, but by an instinctive impulse of the masses, to disregard every tradition which they held dear, to renounce allegiance to the king, separate from the great English empire and make formal alliance with their hated enemy, France, and create a union of which each had been but too jealous. Let us, therefore, not ascribe to our fathers an infallibility which they did not claim for themselves. Democracy acknowledges no living sovereign, much less those who are said to "rule us from their urns." The decadence of Spain, which has cost her the empire of the world and now brought her to the verge of final ruin, is due to her "inordinate tenacity of old opinions, old beliefs, and old habits," which Buckle finds to be her predominant national characteristic.

Great and heroic as are the figures of our epic age, democracy is too progressive to permit the past to fetter the present. The Republic cannot stand still. It must move onward. From civilization it derives inestimable rights; to her it owes immeasurable duties, to shirk which would be cowardice and moral death. No nation can live to itself,