‘“‘More Greeks to help you to discover justice and the rule of reason, O men of Hootsville, about which you know nothing (_interruption_). For great things are here in issue, the greatest of those that are in our control. Much indeed of our human lot we cannot control. Consider how the poets speak concerning the Fates, how the three sisters sit, the one Clotho spinning the stuff of our human lives, and the next Lachesis, mixing the strands and measuring off the lengths, while the last, Atropos, cuts them with her dreaded shears. Men of Hootsville, we must all accept what the Fates send us, as they sit eternally weaving their varied combinations. If I may use your term, you must all do business with these three sisters. In the end you will find you cannot stand out against them.’” But at that,’ said Agathon, ‘there was a great uproar and they refused to listen any more, though Socrates had by no means reached even the middle of his address, and was but making a preliminary distinction. ‘No self-respecting American business citizen, declared the President, red with anger, would have anything to do with a concern so out of date in factory methods as were these three sisters. Did their visitor know that they in Hootsville and everywhere else in the States, had machines which spun, measured, and cut thread in the single operation. And here there were three women employed all the time on what their American machine could do with a hundredth part of the time and effort. To come to a go-ahead community with such a fool proposition was an insult. Hootsville did not fear the competition of these Fates. Hootsville had been insulted as Chicago would not have been, just because Hootsville had not quite overhauled Chicago yet in population. But he could tell their visitor that that was coming, and would like to warn him that if he went on travelling on commission for these Fates and their underwear garments he had better quit advertising the obsolete process or he’d be railroaded out of every decent town. And it was time for everyone to hurry back to business.’ BOOK IV After we had discussed these clubs a little longer, and I had given them the full speech I would have made in Hootsville, Lysis said: ‘And is it true, Socrates, that the lecture-tour of Alcibiades also was not well received?’ ‘It is true,’ I answered. ‘Yet is he not most brilliant and accomplished, and are not his brains, as he says, first-class?’ ‘Assuredly,’ I answered. ‘But his manner was high-spirited, and he did not apply himself to win the favour of the Americans as though they had been the populace of Athens. He broke also, and that in a most shameless manner, the law which is the dearest to them of all their laws. He violated the Volstead Act.’