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.
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