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.
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