‘Why, yes,’ I said, ‘and it is my belief that the present state of affairs cannot endure and that to park will soon be beyond the wit of any save a true philosopher, who will guard his place by his presence upon it night and day. So did Diogenes preserve his claim to the spot where he parked his tub. For the truth can be considered in any place, as I observed to the traffic-policemen in New York, who objected to my examination of Glaucon in Broadway. But for the ordinary Americans, I think, there is no solution except the abolition of offices and the transaction of all business in cars. They will equip their cars as offices and drive from their homes to the market-place. These car-offices will enjoy all the space that is at present filled with buildings. When their cars are so fitted as to take all the papers of their business, they can work freely on the journeys out and home, dictating to their clerks as they go. Nor will it much surprise me if the private home is abolished to give place to the residential car so that the American soul may find a final happiness, and men may be born in cars and live and wed and die in them, and be cremated in the engine, without ever having to put a foot on the ground. And so will arise a new race to take the place of the centaurs of old. For, as the centaurs were half men and half horses, so will these be half men and half motor-cars. And it would seem that of such a race the natural sustenance would be alcohol. So, at least, the future appears to me, or do you not think so, Agathon?’ ‘No’, he said. ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘you may be right. It may happen that everybody will be run over in the next few years, which will disprove all our prophecies and speculations.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that is much more likely.’ ‘But I think,’ I continued, ‘that we will say that whether or not the Americans remain in their cars, we for our part will have nothing to do with them, but rather regard them as a vexatious interruption of right living, and in particular as a great distraction in the search for truth. And we will refuse to sit ourselves down as the Americans love to do and start the machinery and follow whithersoever the car leads. For do you notice how we have wandered out of our course, as generally happens with these machines, and have quite forgotten the original thread of our discourse and the question why the Americans worship this strange god Progress, making an incantation of the name and chanting it as if it were an explanation of the way they spend their lives?’ ‘Well, Socrates,’ said Agathon, ‘most gods are strange, and if they were not strange we should be doubtful if they were gods.’ ‘True,’ I said, ‘but there is a strangeness which helps the divine part of the soul and a strangeness which oppresses it. If we consider the past fortunes of America we shall see how the worship of theirs grew up. And, to begin with, are not the Americans right when they say that theirs is a great country?’