Ancestral feeling should, in this way, always be historical, not individual.  A man is right to be personally proud of his own achievements, but it is difficult to see how he can properly take the same kind of pride in that of others, whether related to him by blood or not.  But there are other kinds of legitimate pride—­family pride, racial pride, group pride of all sorts, where the feeling is not personal.  If any member of a family, a profession or any association, has so conducted himself that credit is gained for the whole body, it is proper that this kind of group pride should be felt by each member of the body, and in the case of a family, where the bond is one of blood, the group feeling should be stronger and the group pride, if it is proper to feel it at all, may be of peculiar strength, provided it be carefully distinguished from the pride due to personal achievement.  And when the member of the family in whom one takes pride is an ancestor, this means, as I have said, that feeling should be historical, not individual.  And anything that tends to lift our interest from the individual to the historical plane—­to make us cease from congratulating ourselves personally on some connection with the good and great and substitute a feeling of group pride shared in common by some body to which we all belong, is acting toward this desirable end.  The body may be a family; it may be the community or the state; it may be as broad as humanity itself, for we may all be proud of the world’s greatest.  Or it may be a body like our own, formed to cherish the memories of forebears in some particular line of endeavor, in some particular place or at some particular era.  Our ancestry is part of our history; so long as our regard for it is properly interwoven with our historical sense, no one can properly charge us with laving the foundation for aristocracy.  We are rather making true democracy possible, for such is the case only when the elements of a community are closely united by ties of blood, interest and knowledge—­by pride in those who have gone before and by determination that the standard set by these men and women of old shall be worthily upheld.

WHAT THE FLAG STANDS FOR[9]

    [9] An address on Flag Day made in St. Peter’s Church, St. Louis.

The most important things in the world are ideas.  We are so familiar with the things that are the material embodiment of ideas—­buildings, roads, vehicles and machines—­that we are prone to forget that without the ideas that gave them birth all these would be impossible.  A house is a mass of wood, stone and metal, but all these substances, collected in a pile, do not suffice to make a house.

A locomotive is made of steel and brass, but although the ancient Romans had both the metal and the alloy, they had no locomotives.

The vital thing about the house—­the thing that differentiates it from other masses of the same materials—­is the idea—­the plan—­that was in the architect’s mind while wood and stone and iron were still in forest, quarry and mine.  The vital thing about the locomotive is the builder’s idea or plan, which he derived, in turn, from the inventor.