putting it out when we never thought of it five or six years
ago. And by the way, when last I was in Denmark, my native land, I
noticed they had a way of flying the flag on Sunday,--whether in honor
of the day, or because they loved it, or because they felt the need of
flying it in the face of their big and greedy German neighbor, I shall
not say. But it was all right. Why can we not do the same? It would not
hurt the flag, and it would not hurt the day. They would both be better
for it--we would all be. You cannot have too much of the flag in the
right way, and there would be nothing wrong about that. Just go into one
of the Children's Aid Society's ragged schools, where the children are
practically all from abroad, and see how they take to it. Watch an
Italian parade, in which it is always borne side by side with the
standard of United Italy, and if you had any doubts about what it stands
for you will change your mind quickly. The sight of it is worth a whole
course in the school, for education in citizenship.

[Illustration: One Way of bringing the Children into Camp:
Basket-weaving in Vacation School.]

And then it looks fine in the landscape always. It always makes me think
there that I added to the red and white of my fathers' flag only the
blue of heaven, where wrongs are righted, and I feel better for it. Why
should it not have the same effect on others? I know it has.

The school might be made the means, as the house to which all the life
of the neighborhood turned, of enrolling the immigrants in the perilous
years when they are not yet citizens. I know what they mean; I have gone
through them, seen most of the mischief they hold for the unattached.
That _is_ the mischief, that they are unattached. A way must be found of
claiming them, if they are not to be lost to the cause of good
citizenship where they might so easily have been saved. I spoke of it in
"The Making of an American." They want to belong, they are waiting to be
claimed by some one, and the some one that comes is Tammany with its
slum politics. The mere enrolling of them, with leave to march behind a
band of music, suffices with the young. They belong then. The old are
used to enrolment. Where they came from they were enrolled in the
church, in the army, by the official vaccinator, by the
tax-collector--oh, yes, the tax-collector--and here, set all of a sudden
adrift, it seems like a piece of home to have some one come along and
claim them, wri