8 Making of the Complete Citizen
hovels, and eke out a mere subsistence. Should it come to that,
culture would vanish. Hitherto, however, we have been more
successful in surpassing the rest of the world on the economic
scale than in equalling it on the cultural scale. We have been,
until the present depression, apparently so well to do that
visitors from older lands expect to find in us more cultiva-
tion of the inner man than they actually do discover. There
is less transmitted refinement of manners, less appreciation
of what traditional education creates, a smaller number of
interesting people than among those who occupy the same
grade of dwellings in Europe. But this is only more obvious
here than there because we have proportionally more new
rich than they. It is so much harder to furnish the mind,
to purge and purify the emotions, that the new rich have
done the easier thing; they have by the use of money made
it easeful for their bodies; and the mind may be threadbare
though the body is well dressed, while dull commonplace
may reign in drawing-rooms of walnut and mahogany. Such
people are as a rule emotional and are swayed by conven-
tional appeals; they are as much under the domination of
uncriticized concepts of conduct as the pioneer on the vanish-
ing frontier, if indeed not more so.
This New World as a whole is conscious, almost pain-
fully conscious, of its need of tradition. Naturam expelles
furca, tamen usque recurret et mala perrumpat furtim fasti-
dia victrix : “Even if you thrust out natural proclivity with
a fork, it will be sure to return and without your knowing
it a perverse daintiness will triumphantly assert itself.”
Though this was meant by Horace for the hold that country
life had on the city dweller, the aphorism expresses the uni-
versal fact, that ingrained disposition will in time break
through any veneer. However roughly the pioneer may
try to extrude tradition, the next generation will bring it