you.

BURGE-LUBIN. You call it a compliment to class us as grown-up children.

CONFUCIUS. Not grown-up children, children at fifty, sixty, seventy.
Your maturity is so late that you never attain to it. You have to be
governed by races which are mature at forty. That means that you are
potentially the most highly developed race on earth, and would be
actually the greatest if you could live long enough to attain to
maturity.

BURGE-LUBIN [_grasping the idea at last_] By George, Confucius, youre
right! I never thought of that. That explains everything. We are just
a lot of schoolboys: theres no denying it. Talk to an Englishman about
anything serious, and he listens to you curiously for a moment just as
he listens to a chap playing classical music. Then he goes back to
his marine golf, or motoring, or flying, or women, just like a bit of
stretched elastic when you let it go. [_Soaring to the height of his
theme_] Oh, youre quite right. We are only in our infancy. I ought to
be in a perambulator, with a nurse shoving me along. It's true: it's
absolutely true. But some day we'll grow up; and then, by Jingo, we'll
shew em.

CONFUCIUS. The Archbishop is an adult. When I was a child I was
dominated and intimidated by people whom I now know to have been weaker
and sillier than I, because there was some mysterious quality in their
mere age that overawed me. I confess that, though I have kept up
appearances, I have always been afraid of the Archbishop.

BURGE-LUBIN. Between ourselves, Confucius, so have I.