eed 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.

To-day men and women living in intolerable industrial conditions are
panting for freedom--the freedom that seems to them just now more
desirable than aught else in the world. All this the flag stands for, but
it stands for much more. Under its folds we are entitled to live our own
lives in the fullest way compatible with the exercise of the same
privilege by others. This includes political freedom, industrial freedom,
social freedom and all the rest. Despite much grumbling and some denials,
I believe that it is all summed up under political freedom, and that we
have it all, though we may not always take advantage of it. The people who
groan under an industrial yoke do so because they do not choose to exert
the power giv