"I am not the flag.  I am but its shadow.  I am whatever you make me; nothing more.  I am your belief in yourself, your dream of what a people may become.  I am all that you hope to be and have the courage to try for.  I am the Constitution and the Courts, the statutes and the statute makers."

"I am no more than what you believe me to be.  I swing before your eyes, a bright gleam of color, a symbol of yourself, the pictured suggestion of that big thing which makes this nation.  My stars and stripes are your dream and your labors.  They are bright with cheer, brilliant with courage, firm with faith, because you have made them so out of your own hearts; for you are the makers of the flag, and it is well that you glory in the making."

"Behold it!  Listen to it! is the command.  Every star has a tongue; every stripe is articulate.  There is magic in the web of it.  It has an answer for every question of duty.  It has a solution for every doubt and perplexity.  It has a word of good cheer for every hour of gloom or despondency."

"It speaks of earlier and later struggles.  It speaks of victories, and sometimes of reverses, on the sea and on the land.  It speaks of patriots and heroes among the living and the dead."

"But before all and above all other associations and memories, whether of glorious deeds, or glorious places, its voice is ever of Constitution and the Laws, of Union and Liberty."

(**Author of the above unknown,

but believed published in 1926.)

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