V
At that moment Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, and Dr. Kurt Yavitch, the histologist (whose report on the destruction of epithelial cells under radium had made the name of Zenith known in Munich, Prague, and Rome), were talking in Doane’s library.
“Zenith’s a city with gigantic power—gigantic buildings, gigantic machines, gigantic transportation,” meditated Doane.
“I hate your city. It has standardized all the beauty out of life. It is one big railroad station—with all the people taking tickets for the best cemeteries,” Dr. Yavitch said placidly.
Doane roused. “I’m hanged if it is! You make me sick, Kurt, with your perpetual whine about ‘standardization.’ Don’t you suppose any other nation is ‘standardized?’ Is anything more standardized than England, with every house that can afford it having the same muffins at the same tea-hour, and every retired general going to exactly the same evensong at the same gray stone church with a square tower, and every golfing prig in Harris tweeds saying ‘Right you are!’ to every other prosperous ass? Yet I love England. And for standardization—just look at the sidewalk cafés in France and the love-making in Italy!
“Standardization is excellent, per se. When I buy an Ingersoll watch or a Ford, I get a better tool for less money, and I know precisely what I’m getting, and that leaves me more time and energy to be individual in. And— I remember once in London I saw a picture of an American suburb, in a toothpaste ad on the back of the Saturday Evening Post—an elm-lined snowy street of these new houses, Georgian some of ’em, or with low raking roofs and— The kind of street you’d find here in Zenith, say in Floral Heights. Open. Trees. Grass. And I was homesick! There’s no other country in the world that has such pleasant houses. And I don’t care if they are standardized. It’s a corking standard!
“No, what I fight in Zenith is standardization of thought, and, of course, the traditions of competition. The real villains of the piece are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these fellows is that they’re so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent. You can’t hate them properly, and yet their standardized minds are the enemy.
“Then this boosting— Sneakingly I have a notion that Zenith is a better place to live in than Manchester or Glasgow or Lyons or Berlin or Turin—”
“It is not, and I have lift in most of them,” murmured Dr. Yavitch.
“Well, matter of taste. Personally, I prefer a city with a future so unknown that it excites my imagination. But what I particularly want—”