"No, I would not say that; and it is exceedingly obliging in you to carry your guardianship so far as even to interpret what I would say. Meanwhile, you have made a remark which claims my attention. You said that I was a Prince in my majority?" "Certainly, your highness, you are a major in so far as the laws of the electoral house of Brandenburg allow the Electoral Prince, in case of his father's death, if he has attained his sixteenth year, to assume the reins of government, independent of governor or regent." "Consequently, if my father were to die (which God forbid!) I might administer the government independently, in my own right?" "Independently and in your own right, your highness." "Whence comes it then that I, who might undertake the government of a whole country, am yet perpetually under restraint in the conduct of my own private life, watched over and treated like an irresponsible boy? It grieves me, Herr von Leuchtmar, to be forced to remind you that the time for my education is past, for I am not sixteen years old, but already several weeks advanced in my eighteenth year." "I thank your highness for this admonition," replied the baron quietly, "and I confess that without it I should not have known that your education was finished." "Sir, you insult me! So you still regard me as nothing but a boy?" "No, your highness, as a man, and I believe that Socrates was right when he said, 'The education of man begins in the cradle and ends only in the grave.'" "You know very well that he meant it in a widely different sense. Our talk is not now of actual education, but of the relations of pupil and teacher. The time of my pupilage is past, Sir Baron, and you will bear in mind, I beg, that I no longer sit in the schoolroom." "That, again, I did not know," said Leuchtmar gently, "and again in my defense I cite the wise Socrates, who said, 'Man is learning his whole life long, to confess at last that the only certain knowledge he has attained is that he knows nothing.'" "Maxims and maxims forever!" cried the Prince impatiently. "You want to evade me--you purposely misunderstand me. Well, then, candidly speaking, I am sick and tired of being everlastingly found fault with, watched over, tutored and spied upon, and once for all I beg that a stop be put to all this." "Will your highness do me the favor to say who it is that finds fault with, watches over, tutors, and spies upon you?" "Why, yes--you, Baron Kalkhun von Leuchtmar, you and the private secretary Müller, you two first and foremost do those very things."