Reference to the details of this seal shows an eagle bearing in its claws the lyre of Orion, both being surrounded by a circle of thirteen stars; but the stars on the seal are all shown as sidereal six-pointed stars, and not five-pointed as are the Washington stars. The stars which were inserted in the flag when the Union Jack was withdrawn were not the six-pointed stars which would be used heraldically if representing a "sidereal constellation," but are the five-pointed stars of the Washington armorial bearings. So it happened that the stars and stripes of the coat-of-arms of the old loyalist English family, to which the successful Revolutionary general belonged, and of the seal with which he had attested the commissions which his officers had received from him, formed the basis for the design of the new American flag, and through them the memory of the great leader and first President of the United States is indissolubly connected with the Stars and Stripes, the national ensign (Pl. III., fig. 3) of the nation which he brought into existence. The American had good right to be proud of that Jack, in whose glories he had so valiantly borne his part, and when as Englishmen battling for the rights of Englishmen the united colonies formed their colonial ensign they had rightly placed the Union Jack in its upper canton as evidence of those glories and of that claim. Afterwards, when their new nation had been framed, and the Washington stars had marked the new allegiance, the thirteen stripes of the old thirteen English colonies still remained to attest to himself and to the world the Americans' share in the preceding centuries of Anglo-Saxon adventure and their heritage in all the liberties and literature of the English tongue. The rights won by the Barons from John, the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, are still theirs by hereditary right, and the thirteen Anglo-Saxon stripes in his national emblem proclaim this to the American of to-day as they did to his forefathers in the thirteen colonies who first placed them in his union ensign. The bitternesses arising out of a fratricidal contest fanned by the misrepresentations of fervid orators have for long decades misread the events and obscured the history of that dividing strife, but British law and the English tongue still speak in the flag of the old English colonies which continues to form part of the national ensign of the United States. CHAPTER XVII. _THE JACK AND PARLIAMENTARY UNION IN BRITAIN._ The history of the flag, so far as we now have followed it, has been the story of martial or naval prowess and of the extension of its power and command around the world; but there is another story told in its combinations which is even greater in power, and has still deeper meaning in the welfare of the peoples who have come beneath its sway.