Family Traditions

       Few things stimulate this family love more than the treasuring in common of family love and tradition, the looking for the repetition of family traits in mind and body, and a certain jealous respect for the honor of those who are not here to maintain their own honor, no matter should it even go so far as to make sure that the descendants of these ancestors shall themselves be decent and honorable people. A certain tenderness for these dead and gone persons is a worthy feeling that, far from doing harm, is deepening and enlarging to the nature; a certain determination to feel this tenderness puts one already into the attitude of reverence that, if it does no other good, inclines one to consider more warmly the good of their other descendants and bind more nearly the family tie. One need not, in order to do fit reverence to the old root of a family tree, follow the example of the Chinese, and make a solemn business of worshiping one's ancestors with prayer and sacrifice and genuflection; nor even the example of those among ourselves who, judged by their conversation with its boasts of past splendor, would seem to be trying to make other people worship their ancestors in order to throw glorification on themselves. For, after all, the most fit act of reverence that we can possibly show this old family tree of ours is to prove to the world that the best part of it is not that which is under the sod.

       To be sure there is a certain pride in armorial bearings and titled descent, with which a republican people have and should have little or nothing to do, and which to those who believe ardently in our institutions seem but agencies of harm, even if looked at more as matters of curiosity and art than in any other way.

The possession of a home.

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