“If ever you want to find out, Dad, what hard work really means, you try farming,” wrote Dick; “and yet I believe you would like it. Hasn’t some old Johnny somewhere described it as the poetry of the ploughshare? Why did we ever take to bothering about anything else—shutting ourselves up in stuffy offices, worrying ourselves to death about a lot of rubbish that isn’t any good to anybody? I wish I could put it properly, Dad; you would see just what I mean. Why don’t we live in simply-built houses and get most everything we want out of the land: which we easily could? You take a dozen poor devils away from walking behind the plough and put them down into coal-mines, and set them running about half-naked among a lot of roaring furnaces, and between them they turn out a machine that does the ploughing for them. What is the sense of it? Of course some things are useful. I would like a motor-car, and railways and steamboats are all right; but it seems to me that half the fiddle-faddles we fancy we want we’d be just as well, if not better, without, and there would be all that time and energy to spare for the sort of things that everybody ought to have. It’s everywhere just like it was at school. They kept us so hard at it, studying Greek roots, we hadn’t time to learn English grammar. Look at young Dennis Yewbury. He’s got two thousand acres up in Scotland. He could lead a jolly life turning the place into some real use. Instead of which he lets it all run to waste for nothing but to breed a few hundred birds that wouldn’t keep a single family alive; while he works from morning till night at humbugging people in a beastly hole in the City, just to fill his house with a host of silly gim-cracks and dress up himself and his women-folk like peacocks. Of course we would always want clever chaps like you to tell us stories; and doctors we couldn’t do without, though I guess if we were leading sensible lives we’d be able to get along with about half of them. It seems to me that what we want is a comfortable home, enough to eat and drink, and a few fal-lal sort of things to make the girls look pretty; and that all the rest is rot. We would all of us have time then to think and play a bit, and if we were all working fairly at something really useful and were contented with our own share, there’d be enough for everybody.