balance evenly betwixt capital and labor, develop our
great natural resources without undue generosity on the one hand or
parsimony on the other--solve the thousand and one problems that rise to
confront us on every hand--we shall never accomplish these things by
struggling singly--one man at a time or even one State at a time, but by
concerted, united effort, the perfect union of which our flag is a symbol,
and which we need to-day even more than we did in 1776 or 1861.

We stand on the threshold of an effort to alter our city government.
Whether that effort should or should not succeed, every citizen must
decide for himself, with the aid of such intelligence and judgment as it
has pleased God to give him. But if he should decide in its favor, be
certain that his individual vote at the polls will go a very little way
toward bringing his desires to pass. We are governed by majorities, and a
majority is a union of many. He who would win must not only vote, but
work. Our flag, with its assemblages of stripes and stars, is a perpetual
reminder that by the union of the many, and not merely by the rectitude of
the individual, are policies altered and charters changed.

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 ind