Again, our flag stands for love.  It is a beautiful flag and it stands for a beautiful land.  We all love what is our own, if we are normal men and women—­our families, our city, our country.  They are all beautiful to us, and it is right that they should be.

I confess that the movement that has for its motto “See America First” has my hearty sympathy.  Not that the Rockies or the Sierras are necessarily more beautiful than the Alps or the Missouri fairer than the Danube; we should have no more to do here with comparisons than the man who loves his children.  He does not, before deciding that he will love them, compare them critically with his neighbors’.  If we do not love the Grand Canyon and the Northern Rockies, the wild Sierras and the more peaceful beauties of the Alleghenies or the Adirondacks, simply because leaving these all unseen we prefer the lakes and mountains of foreign lands, we are like a man who should desert his own children, whom he had never seen, to pass his time at a moving-picture show, because he believed that he saw there faces and forms more fair than those of his own little ones.  When we sing in our hymn of “America”

  I love thy rocks and rills
  Thy woods and templed hills,

we should be able to do it from the heart.

It is indeed fitting that we should love our country, and thrill when we gaze at the old flag that symbolizes that love.  Does this mean that when our country makes an error we are to shut our eyes to it?  Does it require us to call wrong right and black white?

There is a sentiment with which you are all familiar, “My country, may she ever be right; but, right or wrong, my country!”

Understood aright, these are the noblest and truest of words, but they are commonly misinterpreted, and they have done much harm.  To love and stand by a friend who has done wrong is a fine thing; but it would be very different to abet him in his wrong-doing and assure him that he had done right.  We may dearly love a son or a brother who is the worst of sinners, without joining him in sin or persuading him that he is righteous.

So we may say, “Our country, right or wrong” without forfeiting the due exercise of our judgment in deciding whether she is right or wrong, or the privilege of exerting our utmost power to make her do right.

If she is fighting for an unrighteous cause, we should not go over to the enemy, but we should do our best to make her cease and to make amends for the wrong she has done.

Another thing for which the flag stands is freedom or liberty.  We all are familiar with the word.  It means different things to different persons.  When hampering conditions press hard upon a man, all that he thinks of for the moment is to be rid of them.  Without them he deems that he will be free.  The freedom of which our fathers thought, for which they fought and which they won, was freedom from government by what had become to them a foreign power.  The freedom that the black man longed for in the sixties was freedom from slavery.