‘Why,’ I said, ‘whoever deals with them finds that they have nothing to give of the amenities of living. They do not sell you marbles, or statues, or wine, but coal and machinery. And if you buy these things you find they start industry in your own country also. For of all newcomers to a country machinery is the most tenacious of its own character and the most certain to make its new home resemble its old one. An Italian will make Italy again in New York, and a machine will make Sheffield in the furthest Indies.’ ‘And is that really all the British offer the world?’ exclaimed Lysis. ‘They will not last long according to my opinion.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘for it will be realized that these iron machines of theirs are a more deadly threat to the life of a city than was the Wooden Horse himself.’ ‘By Hercules, yes!’ they agreed. ‘If the British had desired wholly to destroy and change Troy they would not have come with besieging armies. They would have sent some machinery and divided the rich against the poor by holding out promises of all the machines would do to make life pleasanter for the rich. And in fewer years than ten, the walls of Troy would have disappeared. The city would have vanished as though it had gone up in vengeful smoke. Indeed it would continue smoking not for a few days, in the manner of Greek destruction, but indefinitely, with chimneys to insult and dwarf the lofty towers of Ilium, if this industrial system of theirs did not make chimneys of the very towers themselves.’ ‘The British, as it seems to me, are most dangerous,’ said Lysis. ‘But,’ said Agathon, ‘they also offer the world other things beside machinery and the coal to feed it with. Wool.’ ‘The sheep’s clothing of the fable,’ I said, ‘and a snare and one in which you soon discover the wolf, as many a simple barbarian race has found. Buy from them one commodity only and you find that they use the money you pay them in a very alarming way. They use it to develop your country.’ ‘How?’ asked Phaelon. ‘Why,’ I said, ‘they make you spend the money you owe them in putting yourself in a position to supply others with some commodity or other, so that you can buy more and more from the British. In this manner they have changed the face of half the world. Those who buy little from them they term “backward peoples.”’ ‘I am sorry for the barbarian world,’ said Lysis, ‘with these two great barbarian races, the British and the American, invading the rest in this cunning way and weaving snares about them.’ ‘Lysis,’ I said, ‘while you feel so full of pity, pity also the British. For I said that what they do they can only do for a certain time.’ ‘How?’ ‘Why,’ I explained, ‘their prosperity depends upon being able to persuade other peoples to buy these goods of theirs.’ ‘Yes.’