A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation's flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the Government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the Nation that sets it forth.
Henry Ward Beecher (1887). “Patriotic Addresses in America and England from 1850 to 1885, on Slavery, the Civil War and the Development of Civil Liberty in the United States”
