CONFUCIUS.  I did not say you could do nothing.  You could fight.  You could eat.  You could drink.  Until the twentieth century you could produce children.  You could play games.  You could work when you were forced to.  But you could not govern yourselves.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Then how did we get our reputation as the pioneers of liberty?

CONFUCIUS.  By your steadfast refusal to be governed at all.  A horse that kicks everyone who tries to harness and guide him may be a pioneer of liberty; but he is not a pioneer of government.  In China he would be shot.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Stuff!  Do you imply that the administration of which I am president is no Government?

CONFUCIUS.  I do. I am the Government.

BURGE-LUBIN.  You!  You!!  You fat yellow lump of conceit!

CONFUCIUS.  Only an Englishman could be so ignorant of the nature of government as to suppose that a capable statesman cannot be fat, yellow, and conceited.  Many Englishmen are slim, red-nosed, and modest.  Put them in my place, and within a year you will be back in the anarchy and chaos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Oh, if you go back to the dark ages, I have nothing more to say.  But we did not perish.  We extricated ourselves from that chaos.  We are now the best governed country in the world.  How did we manage that if we are such fools as you pretend?

CONFUCIUS.  You did not do it until the slaughter and ruin produced by your anarchy forced you at last to recognize two inexorable facts.  First, that government is absolutely necessary to civilization, and that you could not maintain civilization by merely doing down your neighbor, as you called it, and cutting off the head of your king whenever he happened to be a logical Scot and tried to take his position seriously.  Second, that government is an art of which you are congenitally incapable.  Accordingly, you imported educated negresses and Chinese to govern you.  Since then you have done very well.

BURGE-LUBIN.  So have you, you old humbug.  All the same, I don’t know how you stand the work you do.  You seem to me positively to like public business.  Why wont you let me take you down to the coast some week-end and teach you marine golf?

CONFUCIUS.  It does not interest me.  I am not a barbarian.

BURGE-LUBIN.  You mean that I am?

CONFUCIUS.  That is evident.

BURGE-LUBIN.  How?

CONFUCIUS.  People like you.  They like cheerful goodnatured barbarians.  They have elected you President five times in succession.  They will elect you five times more. I like you.  You are better company than a dog or a horse because you can speak.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Am I a barbarian because you like me?

CONFUCIUS.  Surely.  Nobody likes me:  I am held in awe.  Capable persons are never liked.  I am not likeable; but I am indispensable.

BURGE-LUBIN.  Oh, cheer up, old man:  theres nothing so disagreeable about you as all that.  I don’t dislike you; and if you think I’m afraid of you, you jolly well don’t know Burge-Lubin:  thats all.