ing
to the guys that pan and roast and kick and beef, and vomit out filthy
atheism; and all of you 'll come in, with every grain of pep and
reverence you got, and boost all together for Jesus Christ and his
everlasting mercy and tenderness!"

At that moment Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, and Dr. Kurt Yavitch,
the histologist (whose report on the destruction of epithelial cells
under radium had made the name of Zenith known in Munich, Prague, and
Rome), were talking in Doane's library.

"Zenith's a city with gigantic power--gigantic buildings, gigantic
machines, gigantic transportation," meditated Doane.

"I hate your city. It has standardized all the beauty out of life. It
is one big railroad station--with all the people taking tickets for the
best cemeteries," Dr. Yavitch said placidly.

Doane roused. "I'm hanged if it is! You make me sick, Kurt, with your
perpetual whine about 'standardization.' Don't you suppose any other
nation is 'standardized?' Is anything more standardized than England,
with every house that can afford it having the same muffins at the same
tea-hour, and every retired general going to exactly the same evensong
at the same gray stone church with a square tower, and every golfing
prig in Harris tweeds saying 'Right you are!' to every other prosperous
ass? Yet I love England. And for standardization--just look at the
sidewalk cafes in France and the love-making in Italy!

"Standardization is excellent, per se. When I buy an Ingersoll watch or
a Ford, I get a better tool for less money, and I know precisely what
I'm getting, and that leaves me more time and energy to be individual
in. And--I remember once in London I saw a picture of an American
suburb, in a toothpaste ad on the back of the Saturday Evening Post--an
elm-lined snowy street of these new houses, Georgian some of 'em, or
with low raking roofs and--The kind of street you'd find here in Zenith,
say in Floral Heights. Open. Trees. Grass. And I was homesick! There's
no other country in the world that has such pleasant houses. And I don't
care if they ARE standardized. It's a corking standard!

"No, what I fight in Zenith is standardization of thought, and, of
course, the traditions of competition. The real villains of the piece
are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of
trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst
thing about these fellows is that they're so good and, in their