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| Juan Vásquez de Mella y Fanjul (8 June 1861—26 February 1928) |
Because you hold a very strange concept of the Nation and of the Fatherland, which you confine within the narrow limits of the present. The nation is like the human organism, which is governed by the law of constant renewal whereby all the molecules that compose our body disappear, yet the spiritual soul remains, revealed through the continuity of memory and the unity of consciousness. And thus, in the generations that succeed one another upon the national soil, there is also a soul, a vital activity, and, in a certain sense, an informing principle—not subsisting as does that of individuals, but resulting from the beliefs, sentiments, aspirations, interests, memories, and hopes that form that treasury which tradition transmits from one generation to another, as though it were an ark in which the living essence of the Fatherland were enclosed.
It forms the solidarity among generations, which resemble the waves of an immense river that one day reflects serene and starry skies and another day dark tempests; that one day mirrors the greatness of Covadonga and another the misfortune of Guadalete; one day the shadow of Alarcos and another the splendor of Las Navas, the glory of Lepanto, or the sublime misfortune of Trafalgar; yet which always flows along the channel of History, traced through the march of the centuries by the tradition of a people. When the will of the nation—the nation which is not the fortuitous aggregate of people gathered within the shifting limits of a territory, but the moral organism of a series of generations united by an internal spiritual bond—arises, not as the fleeting and passing work of a day, not as an ephemeral will, but as a constant and enduring will revealed in the perennial traditions of History, then those institutions which depart from that tradition and that national spirit, which do not wish to derive their title from it, or which attempt to divert that current from its natural channels, are swept away and cast into the abyss from which they cannot rise again, for they sink forever, and the principle of tradition passes triumphantly over their ruins, to continue History.Translation my own. Speech delivered in the Congress, May 6, 1898; published in Juan Vásquez de Mella, Textos de Doctrina Política, Preliminary Study, Selections and Notes by Rafael Gambra (Madrid, 1953), p.28.
