122 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



whether I might not say that these little grains of English 

 corn do not hold within them the actual flesh and blood 

 of man. Transubstantiation is a fact there. 



Sometimes the grains are dry and shrivelled and 

 hard as shot, sometimes they are large and full and have 

 a juiciness about them, sometimes they are a little bit 

 red, others are golden, many white. The sack stands 

 open in the market — you can thrust your arm in it a 

 foot deep, or take up a handful and let it run back like a 

 liquid stream, or hold it in your palm and balance it, 

 feeling the weight. They are not very heavy as they lie 

 in the palm, yet these little grains are a ponderous weight 

 that rules man's world. Wherever they are there is 

 empire. Could imperial Rome have only grown suffi- 

 cient wheat in Italy to have fed her legions Cassar would 

 still be master of three-fourths of the earth. Rome 

 thought more in her latter days of grapes and oysters 

 and mullets, that change colour as they die, and singing 

 girls and flute-playing, and cynic verse of Horace — any- 

 thing rather than corn. Rome is no more, and the lords 

 of the world are they who have mastership of wheat. 

 We have the mastership at this hour by dint of our gold 

 and our hundred-ton guns, but they are telling our 

 farmers to cast aside their corn, and to grow tobacco and 

 fruit and anything else that can be thought of in pre- 

 ference. The gold is slipping away. These sacks in 

 the market open to all to thrust their hands in are not 

 sacks of corn but of golden sovereigns, half-sovereigns, 

 new George and the dragon, old George and the dragon, 

 Sydney mint sovereigns, Napoleons, half-Napoleons, 

 Belgian gold, German gold, Italian gold ; gold scraped 

 and scratched and gathered together like old rags from 

 door to door. Sacks full of gold, verily I may say that 

 all the gold poured out from the Australian fields, every 



