The Open Air | Page 7

though you have learned your tables, sir. Yet all of us
thinking, and talking, cannot understand why it is when we consider
how clever your people are, and how they bring ploughs, and
steam-engines, and put up wires along the roads to tell you things when
you are miles away, and sometimes we are sown where we can hear the
hum, hum, all day of the children learning in the school. The butterflies
flutter over us, and the sun shines, and the doves are very, very happy
at their nest, but the children go on hum, hum inside this house, and
learn, learn. So we suppose you must be very clever, and yet you
cannot manage this. All your work is wasted, and you labour in
vain--you dare not leave it a minute.
"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 such silly things, and to work for them and to look to them as the
object of their lives. It is because you do not share us among you
without price or difference; because you do not share the great earth
among you fairly, without spite and jealousy and avarice; because you
will not agree; you silly, foolish people to let all the flowers wither for
a thousand years while you keep each other at a distance, instead of
agreeing and sharing them! Is there something in you--as there is
poison in the nightshade, you know it, dear, your papa told you not to
touch it--is there a sort of poison in your people that works them up
into a hatred of one another? Why, then, do you not agree and have all
things, all the great earth can give you, just as we have the sunshine and
the rain? How happy your people could be if they would only agree!
But you go on teaching even the little children to follow the same silly
objects, hum, hum, hum, all the day, and they will grow up to hate each
other, and to try which can get the most round things--you have one in
your pocket."

"Sixpence," said Guido. "It's quite a new one."
"And other things quite as silly," the Wheat continued. "All the time the
flowers are flowering, but they will go, even the oaks will go. We think
the reason you do not all have plenty, and why you do not do only just
a little work, and why you die of hunger if