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superseded by the Power that created you and put you on your trial.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