Let me exaggerate! For in exaggeration there is life and the punch that makes for progress. Whereas no man can manifestly qualify as a live wire who sees things as they are.

Let me exaggerate the number of millions of bacteria to the cubic centimetre in our morning milk; and the hosts of virulent bacilli that make their encampment on the unlaundered dollar-bill; and the anti-social micro-organisms that beset the common drinking-cup.

Let me exaggerate the virtue of assiduously and courageously swatting the common house-fly.

Let me exaggerate the grey and monotonous life of the poor, forgetting the children who dance to the sound of the hurdy-gurdy; and the mothers who smile over their babies in tenement cradles, and the lovers in the parks, and the May parties, and the millions who patronise the moving-picture theatres, and the millions in Coney Island.

Let me exaggerate the grinding, crushing, withering speed of modern industry, forgetting the hundreds of thousands who throng the baseball parks and the additional millions who study the score boards on Park Row.

Let me exaggerate the number of children who go breakfastless to school, since nothing less than 25,000 gets into the newspaper headlines; and the wickedness of regularly ordained clergymen who marry people without asking for a physician's certificate; and the peril of helping an old lady up the Subway steps lest she turn out to be a recruiter of white slaves.

Let me exaggerate the blessings of an age when babies shall be born without adenoids and tonsils, and shall develop just as automatically into clear-eyed little Boy Scouts and Camp-fire Girls.

Let me exaggerate! Teach me that outlook upon life which the highbrow pragmatists describe as the will to believe, and the low-brow describes as pipe dreams! Save me from those twin devils, the Sense of Humour and the Sense of Proportion; for in common sense is stagnation and death, but progress lies in exaggeration!