‘No,’ I said, ‘for the Americans do their business where the climate makes them over-sanguine and they become filled up with the hope of gain and cheerfully sacrifice everything else to the excitement of the contest. But the Londoners regard their business hours as the scraping of a subsistence and skilful avoidance of starvation, and flee from the city every evening. And they live in homes surrounded by other influences than that of commerce, and by the marks of the partial civilization to which South England has attained. But when they are at business they do about as much mischief to the rest of the world as do the Americans.’ ‘Ought we not to hope,’ said Lysis thoughtfully, ‘that the football game will in fact make the Americans very warlike, and that they will attack the English and Scotch?’ ‘Why, Lysis?’ ‘That the great barbarian peoples may destroy each other and that the rest of the world may be freed from the aggression of their industrial life.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it might well be the best thing that could happen. But they are more likely to combine forces in order to industrialize the rest of the world. And though they are very different people yet bonds of similarity are growing up, for machinery sets its stamp upon souls, and the same machines will in the end produce the same souls. To take but one instance, among both peoples there has grown up the love of the Dark Cave.’ ‘What is the Dark Cave?’ asked Lysis and Phaelon together. ‘You tell me,’ I said, ‘that you remember the ideal state that Glaucon and others worked out with me?’ ‘Yes,’ said Lysis, ‘it has often been spoken of since.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I there pictured the unhappy lot of men sitting huddled together in a dark place, condemned all to look in the same direction and to watch phantoms and shadows of men as though they saw something real.’ ‘I remember.’ ‘And I pitied such men, condemned to the contemplation of unreality, and sought, you remember, how they might be rescued and brought out into the sunlight and might learn to see men as they were.’ ‘You thought,’ said Lysis, ‘no lot could be more wretched for reasonable men.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘the Americans and the English are not reasonable and will pay money to be imprisoned in these caves, and to contemplate lies and live altogether in a false world. This is making them one, for the greatest bond of union is to share a common experience.’ ‘Have you ever penetrated into a Dark Cave, Socrates?’ asked Phaelon in excitement. ‘It was the end of my American adventures,’ I answered. ‘For I endeavoured to save men from entering these Caves, reasoning and expostulating with them, asking them why they would give their substance to be so misled about life.’ ‘And what happened, Socrates?’ ‘Alas, my friends,’ I answered, ‘I was considered disgraced for attacking “our American Movies.”’ ‘And in the end, Socrates, I suppose you were deported?’ demanded Lysis. ‘What else, indeed,’ I answered.