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 likea 
liquid stream, or hold it in’ your palm and balance it, 
fecling 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. 
