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.