The name is absent

14 Making of the Complete Citizen

alities revolted against the Roman tradition which in the
universal Catholic Church they felt to be cramping them.

We have all inherited in our culture enduring elements
from Rome, even if we know nothing of Latin. My pur-
pose in referring to that culture at some length is not to
put in a plea for Latin, but to emphasize the fact that the
complete citizen must recognize that a long and rich past
has gone to his making. Of course we are not often con-
scious of the enormous power that tradition has upon us;
and probably it is well that we are not; otherwise few would
dare to challenge it, and progress would be very slow. It
is a social power that bends the strongest. In it the past
accumulates against us, like enormous waves at full tide
which dash on the beach even the most strenuous swimmers
and leave them contemptuously floundering in the backwash.
Tradition may only be surmounted when with fallen pas-
sions its strength has for the time gone out of it. Today
is one of the periods of weakening tradition. We see tra-
ditions dissolving as they come into contact with one an-
other. It is not a case of one being substituted for another,
but of cultures disappearing, as a garden is blighted when
a chilling frost falls upon it. A different spiritual climate,
some think a new Ice Age, has been spreading over the
world, killing off plants that cannot resist the rigor of the
blasts from other regions. The world has been so crushed
together by modern transportation and mechanical trans-
mission that civilizations are jostled by one another, and
people are being carried off their feet from the old trodden
causeways. They have lost their way and are dazed.

European civilization on its external side, chiefly indus-
trial and political, has been introduced into Asia, and it
has undermined the traditions of culture on which the civili-
zations of the Orient had been stabilized for centuries. We

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