When the committee takes you out to drive it is to show their one high building, a high building on a prairie with limitless land to occupy, or a country club as fine as the one in the nearest city. The pride is in looking like something else, not themselves. The growth of this progress in imitation can be traced in the change that has come over the local postal card. All my life I have been a buyer of postal cards, largely on account of my mother, to whom I always sent pictures of the localities through which I was passing. Mother died in 1917, but up to this day I rarely go through a station that I do not say to myself, “I must find a card for Mother”—and turn away with a pang. In the years between 1920 and 1932 the postal card grew steadily less interesting. Once there were pictures of a near-by fort, the earliest house, a local celebrity, a rare view, but now it is all of high buildings and new blocks. They give of course the pictures of the Zoo and the parks, and even the Zoo and the parks pride themselves, like the country club, on their resemblance to those of the nearest large city. The growing evidence that nationalization is blotting out local individuality, destroying the pungent personality of sections, states, communities, struck me with new force after the months I spent in Italy in 1926. In Italy I had found that, however deeply unionism might be written in the hearts of some men, you were a Roman, a Perugian, a Venetian, a Neapolitan before you were an Italian. The long arm of Fascism was reaching into the provinces and the towns, but it did not as yet disturb their ways of life. Mussolini had shown, up to that date, rare knowledge of his Italians. He had left them their ways. Sure of them, they did not worry so much about the change in government. Most of them could see about them the proofs of two thousand years of change; they could show you records and scars of a long succession of emperors, kings, consuls, dictators. It did not seem to make a vast difference to them what the government was if they could go on being themselves. Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.