tempted to doubt your right to live at all.

CONFUCIUS. Do you grudge us the few years we have? you who have three
hundred!

BURGE-LUBIN. You accuse me of levity! Must I remind you, madam, that I
am the President, and that you are only the head of a department?

BARNABAS. Ingratitude too! You draw a pension for three hundred years
when we owe you only seventy-eight; and you call us ungrateful!

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superseded by the Power that created you and put you on your trial.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