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.

MRS LUTESTRING. Yes: that is it. I could not have expressed it in words;
but you have expressed it for me. I felt, even when I was an ignorant
domestic slave, that we had the possibility of becoming a great nation