I4ft MY AMERICAN FRIENDS

cent postage stamps or those of Abraham Lincoln
on the five-cent ditto. So are innumerable
other commodities which we have reason
to thank God are not created unequal or
different. Is it to be wondered at, then, that a
people declared by their own Charter of
Liberty to be themselves mass-produced, stan-
dardized, so to speak, in their mothers' wombs,
should take to standardized mass production as a
means of earning their living ? The sequence is
surely a natural one. And is it not remarkable
that an American writer of genius, like Mr*
Sinclair Lewis, should write as though his country
were discredited by the fact that the boy in Dela-
ware wears a suit identical with that which covers
the nakedness of the boy in Arkansas, or that
when you see a barber and a college man standing
side by side in America you cannot tell which is
which ? What else should we expect in a world
where all men are created equal ? My own
'conclusion, as an outsider, would rather be
that the Americans, by establishing a uniform
technique for the externals of life (which is
what standardization means), have put them-
selves in a favourable posture for developing
their inner differences and so becoming, in the
long run, " astonishingly " unlike one to another*
Which is, in fact, what I have found them to
be.

In a country like America, composed of forty-
eight States, some larger than Germany, widely