Country life; London (England) -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Outdoor books
"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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