BURGE-LUBIN.  As President, I must not listen to unpatriotic criticisms of our national character, Mr Archbishop.

THE ARCHBISHOP.  As Archbishop, Mr President, it is my official duty to criticize the national character unsparingly.  At the canonization of Saint Henrik Ibsen, you yourself unveiled the monument to him which bears on its pedestal the noble inscription, ’I came not to call sinners, but the righteous, to repentance.’  The proof of what I say is that our routine work, and what may be called our ornamental and figure-head work, is being more and more sought after by the English; whilst the thinking, organizing, calculating, directing work is done by yellow brains, brown brains, and black brains, just as it was done in my early days by Jewish brains, Scottish brains, Italian brains, German brains.  The only white men who still do serious work are those who, like the Accountant General, have no capacity for enjoyment, and no social gifts to make them welcome outside their offices.

BARNABAS.  Confound your impudence!  I had gifts enough to find you out, anyhow.

THE ARCHBISHOP [disregarding this outburst] If you were to kill me as I stand here, you would have to appoint an Indian to succeed me.  I take precedence today not as an Englishman, but as a man with more than a century and a half of fully adult experience.  We are letting all the power slip into the hands of the colored people.  In another hundred years we shall be simply their household pets.

BURGE-LUBIN [reacting buoyantly] Not the least danger of it.  I grant you we leave the most troublesome part of the labor of the nation to them.  And a good job too:  why should we drudge at it?  But think of the activities of our leisure!  Is there a jollier place on earth to live in than England out of office hours?  And to whom do we owe that?  To ourselves, not to the niggers.  The nigger and the Chink are all right from Tuesday to Friday; but from Friday to Tuesday they are simply nowhere; and the real life of England is from Friday to Tuesday.

THE ARCHBISHOP.  That is terribly true.  In devising brainless amusements; in pursuing them with enormous vigor, and taking them with eager seriousness, our English people are the wonder of the world.  They always were.  And it is just as well; for otherwise their sensuality would become morbid and destroy them.  What appals me is that their amusements should amuse them.  They are the amusements of boys and girls.  They are pardonable up to the age of fifty or sixty:  after that they are ridiculous.  I tell you, what is wrong with us is that we are a non-adult race; and the Irish and the Scots, and the niggers and Chinks, as you call them, though their lifetime is as short as ours, or shorter, yet do somehow contrive to grow up a little before they die.  We die in boyhood:  the maturity that should make us the greatest of all the nations lies beyond the grave for us.  Either we shall go under as greybeards with golf clubs in our hands, or we must will to live longer.