16 THE OPEN AIE. 



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 

 6 AIR 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 ; 



