‘You are prepared to leave the address to the Business Men’s Lunch Club, then,’ said Agathon, ‘and follow Socrates on a new path?’ ‘Yes,’ said Lysis, ‘let us leave the business men. For my part I feel filled with pity for men leading such a life.’ ‘That is well said, Lysis,’ I replied, ‘for I, too, loved these men and had pity for them, seeing them to work harder than ever during the short hour of refreshment that their code allows them from business. I do not wonder that so many of them drop dead, and I often thought of the captives in the galleys being spurred on to exertions unnatural to man.’ ‘Perhaps,’ said Agathon with a sly look at the other two, ‘your standard of exertion, Socrates, is lower than that of most men.’ ‘I know not how it is in your government office, Agathon,’ I replied, ‘but I do not believe you would long survive the pace set in America, and, indeed, more and more Americans themselves are becoming sensible and ceasing to think a man admirable in proportion as he is always at his business. They have some excellent summer clubs, where they jest and play not for one day only but for several weeks. But I was going to tell Lysis that I can satisfy both his desire and yours, for if you, O Agathon, will tell the substance of my address to those men that will also reveal in what they are lacking, according to my opinion, and in what they are strong. For they are lacking in reasonableness, and they are strong in sociability.’ ‘Then let me read the report,’ said Agathon, and he read from the _Hootsville Courier_ the paragraphs dealing with my address: ‘“The President of the Club introduced the speaker as one who had made good in his own line, and though it was not their own line, they welcomed success wherever they saw it (_applause_). The visitor, as he understood it, was a specialist in truth and goodness, and would no doubt give Hootsville some useful tips. If he, the speaker, understood their visitor’s vocation he was a person you went to consult if you became doubtful about your religion or your politics and he would make you more doubtful still (_laughter_). Fortunately, no one in Hootsville was troubled with any doubts, and he must say he could not see how their visitor would fit into the life there. Still it was a big world, and they could not all live in Iowa. He confessed that he had not known about the visitor till the question of this address was brought up, but since then had looked up his record and, from the reports of the debates that he had seen in the Plato publications, he had no doubt that their visitor had the best of his discussions back in Athens and had hit a home run every time. They welcomed him as a man who had won something, even if it was only an argument (_great applause_). That was what appealed to him, and he thought to all of them, for he did not claim to have read the reports closely or to know what the arguments had been about, but he felt clear their visitor had not come out second best.