In 1876 Mr. J. C. Julius Langbein wrote a small history of our flag and he accepts Mr. Canby’s account of Mrs. Ross making the first flag and suggesting some change in the original design. Learning that a book entitled “Betsey Ross” had been published in 1901, I procured a copy thinking it biographical or historical but it proved to be a romance, pure and simple, woven about Mrs. Ross who is represented as the heroine of her day and the principal designer of the flag. Since 1891, several small works on the flag have been published, written by members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and dedicated to that organization. In those works great honor is given Mrs. Ross, indeed, the members of the D. A. R. as a whole, seem to have accepted Mr. Canby’s story as beyond dispute. In 1908, Mr. John H. Fow published at Philadelphia a book of fifty-four pages entitled “The True Story of the American Flag.” Mr. Fow devotes considerable space to the claims made for Mrs. Ross and considers them without any documentary or record proof. He says, “If Mrs. Ross made a flag in an Arch Street house as claimed, it was made after a design that had been conceived and born somewhere else, and her contribution was no more than the labor that is given by any girl or woman in a flag manufactory. Even according to the paper which was read (by Mr. Canby) before the (Historical) Society in 1870, it is admitted that a design made by someone else was taken to her but that she made some changes in it. Now,” says Mr. Fow, “that is all there is in the Betsey Ross claim. Yet the growing youths of the nation are being misled and taught an historical untruth.” Mr. Fow also says that the Canby claim “is practically charging Washington and the rest of the Committee with seeking to establish and set up in June, 1776, a national ensign before we had declared ourselves a free people on July 4, of the same year, and without any delegated authority to do so, the record of Congress being silent on the subject.” I will not quote further from Mr. Fow’s book, as to do so would unduly lengthen this paper, but the book itself can be found in the Scottsville Free Library. I have lately found in the “Manual of Patriotism for Use in the Public Schools of the State of New York, Edition of 1904, Compiled, Arranged and Edited under direction of Charles R. Skinner, State Superintendent of Public Instruction” the following in relation to the origin of our flag, “A Committee of Congress accompanied by Washington sought out the home and services of Mrs. Elizabeth Ross of Philadelphia—better known as Betsey Ross—to aid them in the flag-making. Her skillful hands and willing heart soon worked out a plan and gave to this country that red, white and blue banner which is the admiration of all nations and the unfailing joy of every true American.” All of which is a very fine example of what may be called “patriotic gush.”