Saint Guido 



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 u? 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 



19 



