“In your government,” said the argumentative bill-collector, who wanted to talk about America and had read about it in Luckner, “nobody has authority. This is a fine thing, to be sure, in a big, rich, empty land, unless there is an emergency. Then you suddenly establish authority. You boast that you have elections even in wartime, but you never change governments then; then you say, ‘Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream’ (we have the same saying in Germany); and you don’t. We don’t pretend that we can.”
