He sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling; thereafter, as he talked, transferring his gaze to his finger-tips, joined with nicety. "Well, I guess I mean something about like this. If we humans are to get on at all, get any further away from having tails and living in trees, we've got to knock down the partitions and make one big room of the world, the same way each nation is one big room, with the blacksmith trading his horseshoes for clothes and not trying to be a tailor himself. Take farmers. Maybe you can't remember, but _I_ can, when old farmers in Connecticut raised nearly every single thing they used all the year around, and were proud of being such idiots. Nowadays the Connecticut farmer don't waste his time trying to grow corn in a climate where you're liable to get frosts in early September; he leaves the farmer in Iowa to do that, and he raises the best apples in the world and with the money he makes that way, he buys him oranges that a Florida farmer has raised. It's my opinion that we've got to come to that on a big, big scale. And if we do come to it there won't be any more wars. Now, I don't know anything about anything but hats, and so I don't try to have an opinion about the League of Nations, nor how the trick is going to be turned by the statesmen--if there are any such--but if it _is_ going to be turned, it's going to take everybody's shoulder to the wheel, you can be sure. And I've got a shoulder. What's got to be done is to get it through everybody's head that every nation ought not to learn to produce anything but what it can produce best, and that self-defense ought not to force it to make a botch of trying to do what another nation could do better. Now, _one_ of the things that France can produce better than other people (and it happens to be the thing that I know about) is hats. I don't know whether it's because she's been at the business of running the styles so long, so much longer than anybody else so that she's got all her fibers settled together, just right to catch the note, the way the wood in an old violin trembles all over at sounds that leave the wood in the leg of a chair perfectly calm. Mind, I don't say the violin is any more important than a chair. As far as I'm concerned personally, if I had to choose I'd rather have the chair. What I'm trying to say is that they are _different_. And we've got to get used to the idea that _because things are different it doesn't mean one is better than the other and they ought both to be like the best one_. Now, maybe it's the other way around, that France has been at this business of setting styles so long because she's had the gift to begin with. Anyhow, what's sure is that they do it better, everything along that line, ribbons, braids, straws, hats, dresses, furniture, houses, parks--original designs don't come from anywhere but France. But France is at war and pretty nearly gone under. She's got to make her designs