If
there is any traditional national costume, it is shirt-sleeves. And it
cherishes the rights of property above any other right whatsoever.
Such are the details that come clustering into one's mind in response to
the phrase, the American tradition.
From the War of Independence onward until our own times that tradition,
that very definite ideal, has kept pretty steadily the same. It is the
image of a man and not the image of a State. Its living spirit has been
the spirit of freedom at any cost, unconditional and irresponsible. It
is the spirit of men who have thrown off a yoke, who are jealously
resolved to be unhampered masters of their "own," to whom nothing else
is of anything but secondary importance. That was the spirit of the
English small gentry and mercantile class, the comfortable property
owners, the Parliamentarians, in Stuart times. Indeed even earlier, it
is very largely the spirit of More's "Utopia." It was that spirit sent
Oliver Cromwell himself packing for America, though a heedless and
ill-advised and unforeseeing King would not let him go. It was the
spirit that made taxation for public purposes the supreme wrong and
provoked each country, first the mother country and then in its turn the
daughter country, to armed rebellion.
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