“’Some time I hope folks will quit handing all the credit to a lot of moth-eaten, mildewed, out-of-date, old, European dumps, and give proper credit to the famous Zenith spirit, that clean fighting determination to win Success that has made the little old Zip City celebrated in every land and clime, wherever condensed milk and pasteboard cartons are known!  Believe me, the world has fallen too long for these worn-out countries that aren’t producing anything but bootblacks and scenery and booze, that haven’t got one bathroom per hundred people, and that don’t know a loose-leaf ledger from a slip-cover; and it’s just about time for some Zenithite to get his back up and holler for a show-down!

“’I tell you, Zenith and her sister-cities are producing a new type of civilization.  There are many resemblances between Zenith and these other burgs, and I’m darn glad of it!  The extraordinary, growing, and sane standardization of stores, offices, streets, hotels, clothes, and newspapers throughout the United States shows how strong and enduring a type is ours.

“’I always like to remember a piece that Chum Frink wrote for the newspapers about his lecture-tours.  It is doubtless familiar to many of you, but if you will permit me, I’ll take a chance and read it.  It’s one of the classic poems, like “If” by Kipling, or Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “The Man Worth While”; and I always carry this clipping of it in my note-book: 

“When I am out upon the road, a poet with a pedler’s load I mostly sing a hearty song, and take a chew and hike along, a-handing out my samples fine of Cheero Brand of sweet sunshine, and peddling optimistic pokes and stable lines of japes and jokes to Lyceums and other folks, to Rotarys, Kiwanis’ Clubs, and feel I ain’t like other dubs.  And then old Major Silas Satan, a brainy cuss who’s always waitin’, he gives his tail a lively quirk, and gets in quick his dirty work.  He fills me up with mullygrubs; my hair the backward way he rubs; he makes me lonelier than a hound, on Sunday when the folks ain’t round.  And then b’ gosh, I would prefer to never be a lecturer, a-ridin’ round in classy cars and smoking fifty-cent cigars, and never more I want to roam; I simply want to be back home, a-eatin’ flap jacks, hash, and ham, with folks who savvy whom I am!

“But when I get that lonely spell, I simply seek the best hotel, no matter in what town I be—­St. Paul, Toledo, or K.C., in Washington, Schenectady, in Louisville or Albany.  And at that inn it hits my dome that I again am right at home.  If I should stand a lengthy spell in front of that first-class hotel, that to the drummers loves to cater, across from some big film theayter; if I should look around and buzz, and wonder in what town I was, I swear that I could never tell!  For all the crowd would be so swell, in just the same fine sort of jeans they wear at home, and all the queens with spiffy bonnets on their beans, and all the fellows standing round a-talkin’ always, I’ll be bound, the same good jolly kind of guff, ’bout autos, politics and stuff and baseball players of renown that Nice Guys talk in my home town!