“’I have never yet toured Europe—­and as a matter of fact, I don’t know that I care to such an awful lot, as long as there’s our own mighty cities and mountains to be seen—­but, the way I figure it out, there must be a good many of our own sort of folks abroad.  Indeed, one of the most enthusiastic Rotarians I ever met boosted the tenets of one-hundred-per-cent pep in a burr that smacked o’ bonny Scutlond and all ye bonny braes o’ Bobby Burns.  But same time, one thing that distinguishes us from our good brothers, the hustlers over there, is that they’re willing to take a lot off the snobs and journalists and politicians, while the modern American business man knows how to talk right up for himself, knows how to make it good and plenty clear that he intends to run the works.  He doesn’t have to call in some highbrow hired-man when it’s necessary for him to answer the crooked critics of the sane and efficient life.  He’s not dumb, like the old-fashioned merchant.  He’s got a vocabulary and a punch.

“’With all modesty, I want to stand up here as a representative business man and gently whisper, “Here’s our kind of folks!  Here’s the specifications of the Standardized American Citizen!  Here’s the new generation of Americans:  fellows with hair on their chests and smiles in their eyes and adding-machines in their offices.  We’re not doing any boasting, but we like ourselves first-rate, and if you don’t like us, look out—­better get under cover before the cyclone hits town!”

“’So!  In my clumsy way I have tried to sketch the Real He-man, the fellow with Zip and Bang.  And it’s because Zenith has so large a proportion of such men that it’s the most stable, the greatest of our cities.  New York also has its thousands of Real Folks, but New York is cursed with unnumbered foreigners.  So are Chicago and San Francisco.  Oh, we have a golden roster of cities—­Detroit and Cleveland with their renowned factories, Cincinnati with its great machine-tool and soap products, Pittsburg and Birmingham with their steel, Kansas City and Minneapolis and Omaha that open their bountiful gates on the bosom of the ocean-like wheatlands, and countless other magnificent sister-cities, for, by the last census, there were no less than sixty-eight glorious American burgs with a population of over one hundred thousand!  And all these cities stand together for power and purity, and against foreign ideas and communism—­Atlanta with Hartford, Rochester with Denver, Milwaukee with Indianapolis, Los Angeles with Scranton, Portland, Maine, with Portland, Oregon.  A good live wire from Baltimore or Seattle or Duluth is the twin-brother of every like fellow booster from Buffalo or Akron, Fort Worth or Oskaloosa!

“’But it’s here in Zenith, the home for manly men and womanly women and bright kids, that you find the largest proportion of these Regular Guys, and that’s what sets it in a class by itself; that’s why Zenith will be remembered in history as having set the pace for a civilization that shall endure when the old time-killing ways are gone forever and the day of earnest efficient endeavor shall have dawned all round the world!