MRS LUTESTRING.  I do.  When I think of the blessings that have been showered on you, and contrast them with the poverty! the humiliations! the anxieties! the heartbreak! the insolence and tyranny that were the daily lot of mankind when I was learning to suffer instead of learning to live! when I see how lightly you take it all! how you quarrel over the crumpled leaves in your beds of roses! how you are so dainty about your work that unless it is made either interesting or delightful to you you leave it to negresses and Chinamen, I ask myself whether even three hundred years of thought and experience can save you from being superseded by the Power that created you and put you on your trial.

BURGE-LUBIN.  My dear lady:  our Chinese and colored friends are perfectly happy.  They are twenty times better off here than they would be in China or Liberia.  They do their work admirably; and in doing it they set us free for higher employments.

THE ARCHBISHOP [who has caught the infection of her indignation] What higher employments are you capable of? you that are superannuated at seventy and dead at eighty!

MRS LUTESTRING.  You are not really doing higher work.  You are supposed to make the decisions and give the orders; but the negresses and the Chinese make up your minds for you and tell you what orders to give, just as my brother, who was a sergeant in the Guards, used to prompt his officers in the old days.  When I want to get anything done at the Health Ministry I do not come to you:  I go to the black lady who has been the real president during your present term of office, or to Confucius, who goes on for ever while presidents come and presidents go.

BURGE-LUBIN.  This is outrageous.  This is treason to the white race.  And let me tell you, madam, that I have never in my life met the Minister of Health, and that I protest against the vulgar color prejudice which disparages her great ability and her eminent services to the State.  My relations with her are purely telephonic, gramophonic, photophonic, and, may I add, platonic.

THE ARCHBISHOP.  There is no reason why you should be ashamed of them in any case, Mr President.  But let us look at the position impersonally.  Can you deny that what is happening is that the English people have become a Joint Stock Company admitting Asiatics and Africans as shareholders?

BARNABAS.  Nothing like it.  I know all about the old joint stock companies.  The shareholders did no work.

THE ARCHBISHOP.  That is true; but we, like them, get our dividends whether we work or not.  We work partly because we know there would be no dividends if we did not, and partly because if we refuse we are regarded as mentally deficient and put into a lethal chamber.  But what do we work at?  Before the few changes we were forced to make by the revolutions that followed the Four Years War, our governing classes had been so rich, as it was called, that they had become the most intellectually lazy and fat-headed people on the face of the earth.  There is a good deal of that fat still clinging to us.