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| Juan Vásquez de Mella y Fanjul (8 June 1861—18 February 1928) |
Man reasons and, therefore, invents, combines, transforms, that is, progresses, and transmits to others the achievements of his progress. The first invention was the first progress; and the first progress, when transmitted to others, became the first tradition that began. Tradition is the effect of progress; but since it communicates it, that is, preserves and propagates it, it is itself social progress. Individual progress does not become social unless tradition embraces it. It is the torch that sadly goes out at its first glimmer if tradition does not take it up and lift it so that it may pass from generation to generation, renewing in new environments the brilliance of its flame.
Tradition is hereditary progress, and progress, if it is not hereditary, is not social progress. A generation, if it is the heir of previous ones, which transmit to it through hereditary tradition what they have received, can accept it and do what good heirs do: increase and perfect it, to communicate it improved to their successors. It can also squander the inheritance or repudiate it. In this case, it bequeaths misery or ruin, and if it has built something, destroying what came before, it has no right to expect the next generation, disinherited of the ruined patrimony, to accept what it has created, and it will likely be left with neither.
Translation my own. Excerpt from a speech delivered at the Parque de la Salud in Barcelona, May 17, 1903; published in Juan Vásquez de Mella, Textos de Doctrina Política, Preliminary Study, Selections and Notes by Rafael Gambra, Madrid, 1953, p.27.This is because Tradition, if it includes the right of ancestors to immortality and respect for their works, also implies the right of subsequent generations and centuries not to have the inheritance of their predecessors destroyed by a rebellious intermediate generation. The savage autonomy of making a clean sweep of everything that came before and subjecting societies to a series of annihilations and creations is a kind of madness that would consist of asserting the right of the wave over the river and the riverbed, when tradition is the right of the river over the wave that stirs its waters.
