The creditors of Strepsiades have not been quiescent meanwhile. We find him, in the next scene, calculating with dismay that it wants but five days to the end of the month, when debts and interest must be paid, or legal proceedings will be taken. He is come to the School, to inquire how his son gets on with his studies. Socrates assures him that his education is quite complete; that he is now furnished with a mode of argument which will win any lawsuit, and get him off scot-free of all liabilities, even in the teeth of a thousand witnesses who could prove the debt. He presents the youth to his father, who is charmed at first sight with the change in his complexion, which has now the genuine disputatious tint. He looks, as Strepsiades declares, “all negations and contradictions,” and has the true Attic expression in his face. The father takes him home rejoicing, and awaits confidently the summons of his creditors. The devices with which the claimants are put off by the new learning of Pheidippides, turn so entirely on the technical expressions of Athenian law, that they have little interest for an English reader. Suffice it to say that the unfortunate tradesmen with whom this young gentleman has run up bills for his horses and chariots do not seem likely to get their money. But the training which he has received in the “Thinking-shop” has some other domestic results which the father did not anticipate. He proceeds, on some slight quarrel (principally because he will quote Euripides, whom his father abominates), to cudgel the old gentleman, and further undertakes to justify his conduct on the plea that when he was a child his father had often cudgelled _him_. _Strep._ Ay, but I did it for your good. _Pheid._ No doubt; And pray am I not also right to show Goodwill to you--if beating means goodwill? Why should your back escape the rod, I ask you, Any more than mine did? was not I, forsooth, Born like yourself a free Athenian? Perhaps you will say, beating’s the rule for children; I answer, that an old man’s twice a child; And it is fair the old should have to howl More than poor children, when they get into mischief, Because there’s ten times less excuse for the old ones. _Strep._ There never was a law to beat one’s father. _Pheid._ Law? pray who made the law? a man, I suppose, Like you or me, and so persuaded others: Why have not I as good a right as he had To start a law for future generations That sons should beat their fathers in return? We shall be liberal, too, if all the stripes You laid upon us before the law was made We make you a present of, and don’t repay them. Look at young cocks, and all the other creatures,-- They fight their fathers; and what difference is there ’Twixt them and us--save that they don’t make laws?