which they understood to mean that if they gave up all their potations there would be more cars. And this was decisive, for they think that everything, even life itself, is worthily sacrificed to increase the number of these cars. They believed furthermore that this sacrifice would increase the quantity of other things at their command.’ ‘I have heard a different reason,’ here put in Agathon, and seeing us nod to him to go on, he unfolded what follows: ‘The Americans,’ he said ‘are a shrewd people, and know that men easily become lovers of ease unless there is necessity or some great future delight to spur them on to exertion. How, they asked themselves, can the mechanics and other workers be kept from the desire for ease and the abandonment of intense daily toil. For a long time the desire to possess a car could be trusted to spur them on, but cars have grown cheap, and it is found beside that such objects tend by contrast to make men love real ease more than ever before. What was needed was to restore the right conception of wealth as something ardently to be longed for, for invention had too greatly levelled the lives of rich and poor. The poor man had motion and music and print and divorce and patent food and cremation, and everything that was once the privilege of the rich. Nature had made men equal in the chief goods like health and affection, thus seeming herself to render vain the end for which, as they thought, men had been created, the production of wealth. And they discovered that the devout worship of Progress, the very process of creating wealth, made the prize of private gain relatively less valuable, thus threatening the springs of energy itself. As extreme wealth gave men the pleasures of successful propaganda so must ordinary wealth have some special privilege attached. And therefore did their chief men resolve to prohibit by law one of life’s greatest amenities, for if a thing is forbidden by the law, only the rich will enjoy it. For wealth everywhere lifts a man above the laws and nowhere more than in the United States.’ ‘Is it perhaps possible,’ asked Phaelon, ‘that it was done from a noble desire to help the Europeans?’ ‘How, dear Phaelon?’ I said. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘it is a great advantage to the Spartans to make their Helots drunk that the young Spartans may have before them the spectacle of drunkenness and be warned and seek temperance. It is surely an equal advantage for Europeans to have at hand a nation of teetotallers (I believe that is the word for such people) lest they should be tempted to err in the opposite direction to the Spartans. For I have read many notices about the great charity of America towards Europe and I wondered if it was this self-denial of which you speak.’