Liberia, Aug. 25 -- One hundred and seventy-nine years ago, seven women stitched a promise into cloth. This Flag Day, as a former Vice President stands charged and a police chief's own claims go unanswered, Liberia should ask honestly whether it has kept it.

PICTURE IT: SEVEN WOMEN, all of them born in America, none of them born free, bent over a length of cloth in 1847, needles moving by hand because there was no other way to make a flag mean something back then. Governor Joseph Jenkins Roberts had asked them to do what no committee of statesmen had been asked to do - to design and stitch, thread by thread, the symbol of a country that did not yet officially exist.

SUSANNAH ELIZABETH LEWIS led them. What they were replacing was itself ...