Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Jefferies, Richard, 1848-1887
"'If you left it a minute it would all be gone; it does not mount
up and make a store, so that all of you could sit by it and be
happy. Directly you leave off you are hungry, and thirsty, and
miserable like the beggars that tramp along the dusty road here.
All the thousand years of labour since this field was first
ploughed have not stored up anything for you. It would not matter
about the work so much if you were only happy; the bees work every
year, but they are happy; the doves build a nest every year, but
they are very, very happy. We think it must be because you do not
come out to us and be with us and think more as we do. It is not
because your people have not got plenty to eat and drink--you have
as much as the bees. Why, just look at us! Look at the wheat that
grows all over the world; all the figures that were ever written in
pencil could not tell how much, it is such an immense quantity. Yet
your people starve and die of hunger every now and then, and we
have seen the wretched beggars tramping along the road. We have
known of times when there was a great pile of us, almost a hill
piled up; it was not in this country, it was in another warmer
country, and yet no one dared to touch it--they died at the bottom
of the hill of wheat. The earth is full of skeletons of people who
have died of hunger. They are dying now this minute in your big
cities, with nothing but stones all round them, stone walls and
stone streets; not jolly stones like those you threw in the water,
dear--hard, unkind stones that make them cold and let them die,
while we are growing here, millions of us, in the sunshine with the
butterflies floating over us. This makes us unhappy; I was very
unhappy this morning till you came running over and played with
us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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