"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.

"It is not because there is not enough: it is because your people are so
short-sighted, so jealous and selfish, and so curiously infatuated with
things that are not so good as your old toys which you have flung away
and forgotten. And you teach the children hum, hum, all day to care about