I had never been a prohibitionist in principle. My whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing. I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws. I believed that the country was gradually learning temperance. But if prohibition could be made to work I was willing it should be tried. But what I saw in these years had led me by 1928 to feel that something unexpected and very disastrous was going on, and that it must be faced, not hidden. It was the most important observation that my crowded lecture days yielded, but as I say it brought me bitter criticism and now and then an intimation from some indignant woman of power and parts that I had sold myself to the liquor interests. One lady even intimated that if she had known that my pen was for sale she would have bid for it. This kind of criticism, however, is one of the things that one who says what he thinks must be prepared to meet. It is very difficult to believe that those who disagree with you are as convinced of the right of their point of view as you are, that they are not being bribed or unduly influenced, have no selfish purpose as you are sure you have not. Two generalizations topping all others came out of this going up and down the land in the years between 1920 and 1932. The first is the ambition of our people to live and think according to what they conceive to be national standards. They adopt them whether they suit their locality or not, and often in adopting them destroy something with individuality and charm. For the traveler it begins with the hotel, spick and span, and as like as two peas to the one in A-ville—B-ville—and so on. Over the way is a sturdy stone building dating from the days of the coach and four. You may sigh for its great rooms and for a sight of the old lithographs sure to be on the wall, but you know it is run down. The town cannot support two, and it prefers the smart and comfortable commonplace to modernizing its fine old inn. Look out your hotel window and you will see opposite a smart, little dress shop, a duplicate of one you have been seeing everywhere you have halted, a duplicate of many a one you have seen on New York avenues. Next door is a standardized beauty parlor, and the pretty girl who waits on you at the table, the daughter probably of some solid and self-respecting townsman, has the latest coiffure and blood-red nails. She is struggling to look as she supposes girls do in Chicago or New York.