the embodiment, not of a sentiment, but of a history, and no man can
rightly serve under that flag who has not caught some of the meaning of
that history.

Experience, ladies and gentlemen, is made by men and women. National
experience is the product of those who do the living under that flag. It
is their living that has created its significance. You do not create the
meaning of a national life by any literary exposition of it, but by the
actual daily endeavors of a great people to do the tasks of the day and
live up to the ideals of honesty and righteousness and just conduct. And
as we think of these things, our tribute is to those men who have
created this experience. Many of them are known by name to all the
world--statesmen, soldiers, merchants, masters of industry, men of
letters and of thought who have coined our hearts into action or into
words. Of these men we feel that they have shown us the way. They have
not been afraid to go before. They have known that they were speaking
the thoughts of a great people when they led that great people along the
paths of achievement. There was not a single swashbuckler among them.
They were men of sober, quiet thought, the more effective because there
was no bluster in it. They were men who thought along the lines of duty,
not along the lines of self-aggrandizement. They were men, in short, who
thought of the people whom they served and not of themselves.

But while we think of these men and do honor to them as to those who
have shown us the way, let us not forget that the real experience and
life of a nation lies with the great multitude of unknown men. It lies
with those men whose names are never in the headlines of newspapers,
those men who know the heat and pain and desperate loss of hope that
sometimes comes in the great struggle of daily life; not the men who
stand on the side and comment, not the men who merely try to interpret
the great struggle, but the men who are engaged in the struggle. They
constitute the body of the nation. This flag is the essence of their
daily endeavors. This flag does not express any more than what they are
and what they desire to be.

As I think of the life of this great nation it seems to me that we
sometimes look to the wrong places for its sources. We look to the noisy
places, where men are talking in the market place; we look to where men
are expressing their individual opinions; we look to where partisans are
expressing passions: ins