Writing a book is a great adventure itself. Sometimes for weeks on end you sit up and write and write and write. Then one morning you read it, and you yell at yourself: "Who in God's name wrote this trash?" You write it over; then you see the yawning chasm of the waste basket, and you plunk it in. So if some of the chapters still are trash, there is a feeling of relief comes over me nevertheless, for many a trashy one has been pitched out.

Sometimes, also, you flash along paragraph after paragraph, and sometimes, writing is hard. When I wrote of the War it came easily and I could hear the noise and the screech and see the color not as of yesterday but as a cavalcade marching on before me. War still is red and horrid and burning in my eyes.

But this is the last chapter, and I do not know whether to feel sad or gay. It is like saying goodbye or something, or leaving home and going far away to a land where you will never see your friends again. Or it is like death.

But this is my last chapter.

I have written it over and over again. One was a long dissertation on science; I ended it something like this: "We should ever follow the shining star of science." Mr. Maverick, I said, you sound pretentious. Bishop Manning, in order to let people know he is a Christian gentleman, must end with sacred texts and talk about God. Mr. Maverick, I am sorry, very sorry, but you are just an inverted Bishop Manning trying to prove you are scientific. So I cut that out.

I can tell you in one or two sentences what I said, boiling down all the verbosity of the chapter I threw out into a few words. It was to follow science, and not taboos. It was to make our institutions fit our needs. And then, I pray you, don't be silly about the Supreme Court.

But we have characters, ideas, principles, all hanging in the air. We will take the big smug-mug of the hometown, the Honorable Raphael T. Coward, of whom there are hundreds everywhere. What are we to do with him? I do not know. But I got to thinking the other day, in Washington. Here we have hundreds of a new kind of men, men devoted to conserving their country, rather than to making money out of it and destroying it.

Tommy Corcoran and Benny Cohen—the hated brain-trusters of the President. Packed with brains and idealism, working day and night, they are different from the pioneers of fifty or a hundred years ago. Old Raphael will die. His influence is already gone. He cannot even steal elections any more. Back in the hometown he put up ten thousand dollars to help steal one election, and the hot shot he gave it to stole half to start with; and the bribery did no good.

In Washington, and all over the country, Tommies and Bennies are coming up, and in ten years they will either run the country, or be run out of it. That, then, is what we must think of, the old-timers and the new-timers, all the way from the hometown to Washington and New York, the land we live on, the factories and the farms, how all these people and things can be made to work.

And so I come to New York, where I must read proof. I take a taxi way down to the East River. There is a building with a blank wall in front, it is dark and dreary, there is coal-dust. It is not anything like Texas. A tugboat screeches.

The elevator shoots up. High on the eleventh floor, and there are many people. All working and busy. I wonder, do these people, these strange people who live in their high houses, who ride subways, see their movies, turn on their steam heat, do they know of our green America, the land and the water that is washing it away?

They hand me proof. I start to read. Is it an earthquake? For surely the building is swaying. Fear comes over me. My head rolls. The room is locked, but outside people are quiet, they are not worried, they have no fear. So neither shall I have fear, and I sit down to begin reading proof again. But the building really is swaying.

My head is swimming.

Just then someone enters the door.

"Oh, say, Mr. Maverick, we forgot to tell you, the building shakes and trembles a little. It is the presses."

I pretend not to be worried at all. I say "How could the building keep from trembling, with such a book as this?" But I am relieved, and go on reading the proof.

After awhile, I leave. There is the river. Docks, ships, boats, men in dingy clothes, the wind blowing and crying. A house on the corner: "The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals." A hungry kid walks by.

Yes, this is my country. It is America, after all, and we have got to make a go of it.

So I will tell you one story, and then I shall be finished. I am going to leave you six white pages, and you can write your conclusions there yourself. In that way I am finished, and you will have written the last chapter yourself, saying just how we are going to save the country.

Oh, the story.

It is an old American custom, or more properly an old Texas custom, to take "Good Will Tours" into Mexico. They are gotten up by the Chambers of Commerce.

We all wear a certain kind of hat with colored hatbands. We all carry canes. Then we march into Mexico to spread around the good will. The Mexicans give us banquets. In return we drink too much—at least we did in the Bootleg Decade, and make spectacles of ourselves. We criticize the government, the educational system and the country. We let them know we are superior.

With a crowd of first-class insulters, I walked down the street. An American, and for all I know it may have been myself, said to an old Mexican who looked like an Aztec image, "Who are the greatest people on this earth?"

Quick as a flash and in perfect English, he said: "They are the greatest people who live most scientifically and most conveniently to themselves."

Now you know in general outline what American ought to do. Take out your pencil and finish out the details and specifications. Thus together we will have written a book.