‘I do,’ I agreed. ‘And are they not an active people and one ready to make experiment, even to experiment with European usages?’ ‘I believe so.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘will they not be forced to realize that they were the very last people in the world who should have attempted Prohibition, for they cannot even protect human life well. For if they had been a very poor people, fighting for a share in the commerce of nations, and endowed with a tradition of law observance, then they might have attempted this further discipline. But the Americans were not poor, nor were they desperately in need of such efficiency. Indeed no people could better afford to drink.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and their laws were the last laws that could stand the strain. For they have never been well kept, and there has always been corruption. So that they did not do well when they outlawed a permanent human appetite and made another enemy to the law.’ ‘Did you keep the law yourself, Socrates?’ said Lysis, ‘for you always say that even a bad law should be obeyed because it is the law.’ ‘Why,’ I answered, ‘thinking as I do, and being the guest of the Americans, I would take no step to avoid the abstinence that the law imposed. Yet I must confess that there was no city in which I went unrefreshed.’ ‘A great thing is friendship,’ exclaimed Lysis. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘my friends and hosts everywhere insisted, not all of them everywhere, but some in every place, who sought me out, knowing that I was from the Mediterranean.’ ‘And when these drinks were offered to you, Socrates,’ demanded Lysis, looking me straight in the face and fixing his eyes on mine, ‘did you still tell them that all laws should be obeyed until they can be altered?’ ‘Assuredly.’ ‘What did they answer?’ ‘That I was to drink my fill, and not be at all uneasy lest I was breaking any law, because it was lawful to drink the wine that you possessed in your cellar before the law was made. It seems it was always such wine that I was drinking. Nor did they seem to fear that they would ever exhaust those cellars of theirs.’ ‘Happy Socrates,’ they said.