Next day proved warm and sunny, and we started early, to enjoy the luxury of a good long chat before he would be obliged to leave me. “This neighbourhood has more than its due proportion of the _very_ poor,” I remarked, as we passed a group of hovels, too dilapidated to deserve the name of “cottages.” “But the few rich,” Arthur replied, “give more than their due proportion of help in charity. So the balance is kept.” “I suppose the _Earl_ does a good deal?” “He _gives_ liberally; but he has not the health or strength to do more. Lady Muriel does more in the way of school-teaching and cottage-visiting than she would like me to reveal.” “Then _she_, at least, is not one of the ‘idle mouths’ one so often meets with among the upper classes. I have sometimes thought they would have a hard time of it, if suddenly called on to give their _raison d’être_, and to show cause why they should be allowed to live any longer!” “The whole subject,” said Arthur, “of what we may call ‘idle mouths’ (I mean persons who absorb some of the material _wealth_ of a community—in the form of food, clothes, and so on—without contributing its equivalent in the form of productive _labour_) is a complicated one, no doubt. I’ve tried to think it out. And it seemed to me that the simplest form of the problem, to start with, is a community without _money_, who buy and sell by _barter_ only; and it makes it yet simpler to suppose the food and other things to be capable of _keeping_ for many years without spoiling.” “Yours is an excellent plan,” I said. “What is your solution of the problem?” “The commonest type of ‘idle mouths,’” said Arthur, “is no doubt due to money being left by parents to their own children. So I imagined a man—either exceptionally clever, or exceptionally strong and industrious—who had contributed so much valuable labour to the needs of the community that its equivalent, in clothes, &c., was (say) five times as much as he needed for himself. We cannot deny his _absolute_ right to give the superfluous wealth as he chooses. So, if he leaves _four_ children behind him (say two sons and two daughters), with enough of all the necessaries of life to last them a life-time, I cannot see that the _community_ is in any way wronged if they choose to do nothing in life but to ‘eat, drink, and be merry.’ Most certainly, the community could not fairly say, in reference to _them_, ‘_if a man will not work, neither let him eat_.’ Their reply would be crushing. ‘The labour has already been _done_, which is a fair equivalent for the food we are eating; and you have had the benefit of it. On what principle of justice can you demand _two_ quotas of work for _one_ quota of food?’” “Yet surely,” I said, “there is something wrong _somewhere_, if these four people are well able to do useful work, and if that work is actually _needed_ by the community, and they elect to sit idle?”