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 stee