ONFUCIUS. The English always suspended it when it threatened to be of
the slightest use.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, trial by jury: you cant deny that we established
that?

CONFUCIUS. All cases that were dangerous to the governing classes were
tried in the Star Chamber or by Court Martial, except when the prisoner
was not tried at all, but executed after calling him names enough to
make him unpopular.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, bother! You may be right in these little details; but
in the large we have managed to hold our own as a great race. Well,
people who could do nothing couldnt have done that, you know.

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 im