disappointment after last week’s slap-up talk on personal contacts in business.”’ ‘Poor Socrates!’ said Lysis; ‘did no one call yours a slap-up talk?’ ‘I am afraid not,’ I said, ‘but then I said things they were not very eager to hear, and even before I spoke there had been much question whether I should be asked.’ ‘Yes,’ said Agathon, ‘many doubted the propriety of asking him, after a local minister had declared that our friend was not only a sort of dago but that he was the lowest of crawling creatures, a man who had knocked his own home town, meaning that he had criticized many of the actions of the Athenians. But another minister said that he had something in him and was a prominent citizen back in Athens, and had secured a wide publicity for his slogan “Boost Knowledge,” though he was mistaken in thinking that Socrates had used that actual expression.’ ‘But what was the address about?’ Lysis demanded. I answered him: ‘It was about the place of liberty in the life of the State, which they did not seem to me to understand.’ ‘Indeed,’ said Agathon, ‘they soon grow restive if you speak of liberty.’ ‘Indeed yes,’ I assented. ‘And yet two minutes before they had been singing some praises to a sweet land of liberty which was also, as I understood the words, the home of the brave and free. But when the Americans rejoice that they are free they mean free from King George III. For they are slow in some matters.’ ‘It is like you Socrates,’ said Lysis, ‘to seize hold boldly of this question of liberty and not to let go but to force them to examine it.’ ‘My heart had been touched,’ I replied, ‘by a spectacle which I saw when first our boat anchored in New York Harbour. There is an island there called Ellis Island, the abode of the rejected of America, where I also spent two days. Many emigrants think that they are emigrating to the United States when in fact they are emigrating to Ellis Island, which is not a land of opportunity at all. So there crowd on Ellis Island the wretched people whom America will not accept. Among the figures in that part of the harbour there was one that at once held my attention because she was so much greater and nobler than the rest. But she was not allowed on the mainland. Going close to her I saw that it was Liberty herself. She also was classed as undesirable. I will confess that I could understand the Amazons of the Mississippi fearing her, so great and strong was she, and of such mighty reputation. Her plight too was more wretched than that of the others, because they all stretched out their hands with longing to the further bank, as the poet has well sung, but with some hope also that there would one day be room for them in the quota. But Liberty had no quota at all.’ ‘What is this quota?’ asked Lysis.