'Yes, you work hard for money. You eat and drink, and boast of your exercises: they sharpen your appetites. So goes the round. We strive, we fail; you are our frog-chorus of critics, and you suppose that your brekek-koax affects us. I say we strive and fail, but we strive on, while you remain in a past age, and are proud of it. You reproach us with lack of common sense, as if the belly were its seat. Now I ask you whether you have a scheme of life, that I may know whether you are to be another of those huge human pumpkins called rich men, who cover your country and drain its blood and intellect--those impoverishers of nature! Here we have our princes; but they are rulers, they are responsible, they have their tasks, and if they also run to gourds, the scandal punishes them and their order, all in seasonable time. They stand eminent. Do you mark me? They are not a community, and are not-- bad enough! bad enough!--but they are not protected by laws in their right to do nothing for what they receive. That system is an invention of the commercial genius and the English.' 'We have our aristocracy, Herr Professor.' 'Your nobles are nothing but rich men inflated with empty traditions of insufferable, because unwarrantable, pride, and drawing, substance from alliances with the merchant class. Are they your leaders? Do they lead you in Letters? in the Arts? ay, or in Government? No, not, I am informed, not even in military service! and there our titled witlings do manage to hold up their brainless pates. You are all in one mass, struggling in the stream to get out and lie and wallow and belch on the banks. You work so hard that you have all but one aim, and that is fatness and ease!' 'Pardon me, Herr Professor,' I interposed, 'I see your drift. Still I think we are the only people on earth who have shown mankind a representation of freedom. And as to our aristocracy, I must, with due deference to you, maintain that it is widely respected.' I could not conceive why he went on worrying me in this manner with his jealous outburst of Continental bile. 'Widely!' he repeated. 'It is widely respected; and you respect it: and why do you respect it?' 'We have illustrious names in our aristocracy.' 'We beat you in illustrious names and in the age of the lines, my good young man.' 'But not in a race of nobles who have stood for the country's liberties.' 'So long as it imperilled their own! Any longer?' 'Well, they have known how to yield. They have helped to build our Constitution.' 'Reverence their ancestors, then! The worse for such descendants. But you have touched the exact stamp of the English mind:--it is, to accept whatsoever is bequeathed it, without inquiry whether there is any change in the matter. Nobles in very fact you would not let them be if they could. Nobles in name, with a remote recommendation to posterity--that suits you!'