'To do good! There is hardly a prince or millionaire, in history or
alive, who has not in his young days hugged that notion. Pleasure
swarms, he has the pick of his market. You English live for pleasure.'

'We are the hardest workers in the world.'

'That you may live for pleasure! Deny it!'

He puffed his tobacco-smoke zealously, and resumed:

'Yes, you work hard for money. You eat and drink, and boast of your
exercises: they sharpen your appetites. So goes the round. We strive,
we fail; you are our frog-chorus of critics, and you suppose that your
brekek-koax affects us. I say we strive and fail, but we strive on,
while you remain in a past age, and are proud of it. You reproach us
with lack of common sense, as if the belly were its seat. Now I ask you
whether you have a scheme of life, that I may know whether you are to be
another of those huge human pumpkins called rich men, who cover your
country and drain its blood and intellect--those impoverishers of nature!
Here we have our princes; but they are rulers, they are responsible,
they have their tasks, and if they also run to gourds, the scandal
punishes them and their order, all in seasonable time. They stand
eminent. Do you mark me? They are not a community, and are not--
bad enough! bad enough!--but they are not protected by laws in their
right to do nothing for what they receive. That system is an invention
of the commercial genius and the English.'

'We have our aristocracy, Herr Professor.'