STANDARDIZATION 135

general observations may not be out of
place.

Before proceeding to comment, adversely or
otherwise, on standardization as it exists in
America the commentator (whether domestic or
foreign) would enter upon his task with a clearer
mind if he would pause to consider the pheno-
menon as it exists in himself—in his person, habits,
.speech, modes of thought and general conver-
sation with the universe and his fellow-men.
1 Might not nature be justly accused of having
standardized us all ? Have we not all two legs,
two arms, two eyes, two ears and a general
equipment of functioning members repeated
without essential difference in every one of the
two thousand million human beings inhabiting
the planet ? From that point of view might we
not go farther than M. Siegfried and say that not
Americans only but all the children of Adam
are astonishingly alike ? Mr. Sinclair Lewis,
in the fiery passage quoted above, remarks on the
tiresome identity between the suit of clothes
worn by a boy in Delaware and the suit worn by
a boy in Arkansas. But if Mr. Lewis were to
strip the two boys of their identical suits and
inspect them in -purls naturalises he would observe
that the suits with which nature had provided
them, to wit their skins, were more closely
identical in cut, fashion and texture than those
the boys had purchased in the chain store—not to
speak of a thousand other identities too numerous