“I certainly was astonished in the streets of our lovely little city, the other day.  I met the meanest kind of critter that God ever made—­meaner than the horned toad or the Texas lallapaluza! (Laughter.) And do you know what the animile was?  He was a knocker! (Laughter and applause.)

“I want to tell you good people, and it’s just as sure as God made little apples, the thing that distinguishes our American commonwealth from the pikers and tin-horns in other countries is our Punch.  You take a genuwine, honest-to-God homo Americanibus and there ain’t anything he’s afraid to tackle.  Snap and speed are his middle name!  He’ll put her across if he has to ride from hell to breakfast, and believe me, I’m mighty good and sorry for the boob that’s so unlucky as to get in his way, because that poor slob is going to wonder where he was at when Old Mr. Cyclone hit town! (Laughter.)

“Now, frien’s, there’s some folks so yellow and small and so few in the pod that they go to work and claim that those of us that have the big vision are off our trolleys.  They say we can’t make Gopher Prairie, God bless her! just as big as Minneapolis or St. Paul or Duluth.  But lemme tell you right here and now that there ain’t a town under the blue canopy of heaven that’s got a better chance to take a running jump and go scooting right up into the two-hundred-thousand class than little old G. P.!  And if there’s anybody that’s got such cold kismets that he’s afraid to tag after Jim Blausser on the Big Going Up, then we don’t want him here!  Way I figger it, you folks are just patriotic enough so that you ain’t going to stand for any guy sneering and knocking his own town, no matter how much of a smart Aleck he is—­and just on the side I want to add that this Farmers’ Nonpartisan League and the whole bunch of socialists are right in the same category, or, as the fellow says, in the same scategory, meaning This Way Out, Exit, Beat It While the Going’s Good, This Means You, for all knockers of prosperity and the rights of property!

“Fellow citizens, there’s a lot of folks, even right here in this fair state, fairest and richest of all the glorious union, that stand up on their hind legs and claim that the East and Europe put it all over the golden Northwestland.  Now let me nail that lie right here and now.  ‘Ah-ha,’ says they, ’so Jim Blausser is claiming that Gopher Prairie is as good a place to live in as London and Rome and—­and all the rest of the Big Burgs, is he?  How does the poor fish know?’ says they.  Well I’ll tell you how I know!  I’ve seen ’em!  I’ve done Europe from soup to nuts!  They can’t spring that stuff on Jim Blausser and get away with it!  And let me tell you that the only live thing in Europe is our boys that are fighting there now!  London—­I spent three days, sixteen straight hours a day, giving London the once-over, and let me tell you that it’s nothing but a bunch of fog and out-of-date buildings that no live American burg would stand for one minute.  You may not believe it, but there ain’t one first-class skyscraper in the whole works.  And the same thing goes for that crowd of crabs and snobs Down East, and next time you hear some zob from Yahooville-on-the-Hudson chewing the rag and bulling and trying to get your goat, you tell him that no two-fisted enterprising Westerner would have New York for a gift!