The right of peoples, little as well as strong nations, to live their own lives, to preserve their own political autonomy, to develop their own traditions, is part of the Latin lesson learned in the throes of the great Revolution. It is expressed passionately, wistfully in that universal cry of the French people: "We must end this thing--it must never happen again--we must win the right to live as we see fit, not under the dictation of another!" To the Latin mind the world is peopled by individuals who cannot and should not be pressed in the same political or economic mould, who must win their individual salvation by an individual struggle and evolution. This is the ideal of liberty the world over, which prompted France to send us help in our struggle with England. It is a wasteful, an uneconomic ideal, as we Americans have proved in our slovenly administration of our great inheritance. Yet we would not have a machine-made, autocratic organization, no matter how clean and thrifty and efficient it might make our cities. We prefer the slow process of conversion to the machine process of coercion. And that is one source of our sympathy with French civilization. Let us have all liberty to its possible limit short of license: the Latin intelligence has known how to preserve liberty from becoming license. The result in the human being of the principle of liberty is individual intelligence and spiritual power; those are the high ideals toward which democracy aims. The cost of them is efficiency, organization--immediate results which German discipline obtains. But the cost of the German ideal is the humanity of life, and that is too big a price to pay. That there should be found many among us who are willing to exchange the spiritual flower of our civilization for the sake of a more efficient social organization is evidence of the extent to which the cancer of a materialistic commercialism has already eaten into our life.
The Latin vision of life includes chivalry, as has been abundantly revealed by the spirit of the French, sorely tried in their struggle with the new barbarian. Chivalry means beauty of conduct, an uneconomic, a sentimental ideal, but without which the life of man on this earth would be forlorn, lacking in dignity, in meaning. Take from mankind the shadowy dream of himself implied in his desire for a chivalrous world, and you leave him a naked animal from the jungle, more despicable the more skillful he becomes in gratifying his lusts. The Latin vision of life includes also beauty of art, man's radiation of his inner spiritual world, and closely woven with the love of art is respect for tradition--reverence for the past which has been bequeathed to him by his ancestors, which is incorporated in his blood.