My friends laughed, and the Altrurian continued: “I am very glad to hear it, for I feel myself at a peculiar disadvantage among you. I am not only a foreigner, but I am so alien to you in all the traditions and habitudes that I find it very difficult to get upon common ground with you. Of course, I know theoretically what you are, but to realize it practically is another thing. I had read so much about America and understood so little that I could not rest without coming to see for myself. Some of the apparent contradictions were so colossal--” “We have everything on a large scale here,” said the banker, breaking off the ash of his cigar with the end of his little finger, “and we rather pride ourselves on the size of our inconsistencies, even. I know something of the state of things in Altruria, and, to be frank with you, I will say that it seems to me preposterous. I should say it was impossible, if it were not an accomplished fact; but I always feel bound to recognize the thing done. You have hitched your wagon to a star, and you have made the star go; there is never any trouble with wagons, but stars are not easily broken to harness, and you have managed to get yours well in hand. As I said, I don’t believe in you, but I respect you.” I thought this charming, myself; perhaps because it stated my own mind about Altruria so exactly and in terms so just and generous. “Pretty good,” said the doctor, in a murmur of satisfaction, at my ear, “for a bloated bond-holder.” “Yes,” I whispered back, “I wish I had said it. What an American way of putting it! Emerson would have liked it himself. After all, he was our prophet.” “He must have thought so from the way we kept stoning him,” said the doctor, with a soft laugh. “Which of our contradictions,” asked the banker, in the same tone of gentle bonhomie, “has given you and our friend pause just now?” The Altrurian answered, after a moment: “I am not sure that it is a contradiction, for as yet I have not ascertained the facts I was seeking. Our friend was telling me of the great change that had taken place in regard to work, and the increased leisure that your professional people are now allowing themselves; and I was asking him where your working-men spent their leisure.” He went over the list of those he had specified, and I hung my head in shame and pity; it really had such an effect of mawkish sentimentality. But my friends received it in the best possible way. They did not laugh; they heard him out, and then they quietly deferred to the banker, who made answer for us all: “Well, I can be almost as brief as the historian of Iceland in his chapter on snakes: those people have no leisure to spend.” “Except when they go out on a strike,” said the manufacturer, with a certain grim humor of his own; I never heard anything more dramatic than the account he once gave of the way he broke up a labor union. “I have seen a good many of them at leisure then.”