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 sufficient wheat in Italy to have fed her legions Caesar 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 - anything 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 preference. 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 pennyweight of it, hundreds
of tons, all shipped over the sea to India, Australia, South Africa,
Egypt, and, above all, America, to buy wheat. It was said that Pompey and
his sons covered the great earth with their bones, for each one died in a
different quarter of the world; but now he would want two more sons for
Australia and America, the two new quarters which are now at work
ploughing, sowing, reaping, without a month's intermission, growing corn
for us. When you buy a bag of flour at the baker's you pay fivepence over
the counter, a very simple transaction. Still you do not expect to get
even that little bag of flour for nothing, your fivepence goes over the
counter in somebody else's till. Consider now the broad ocean as the
counter and yourself to represent thirty-five millions of English people
buying sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen million quarters of wheat from the
nations opposite, and paying for it shiploads of gold.
So that these sacks of corn in the market are truly filled with gold
dust; and how strange it seems at first that our farmers, who are for
ever dabbling with their hands in these golden sands, should be for ever
grumbling at their poverty! 'The nearer the church the farther from God'
is an old country proverb; the nearer to wheat the farther from mammon, I
may construct as an addendum. Quite lately a gentleman told me that while
he grew wheat on his thousand acres he lost just a pound an acre per
annum, - i.e. - a thousand a year out of capital, so that if he had not
happily given up this amusement he would now have been in the workhouse
munching the putty there supplied for bread.
The rag and bone men go from door to door filling an old bag with scraps
of linen, and so innumerable agents of bankers and financiers, vampires
that suck gold, are for ever prowling about collecting every golden coin
they can scent out and shipping it over sea. And what does not go abroad
is in consequence of this great drain sharply locked up in the London
safes as reserves against paper, and cannot be utilised in enterprises or
manufacture. Therefore trade stands still, and factories are closed, and
ship-yards are idle, and beautiful vessels are stored up doing nothing by
hundreds in dock; coal mines left to be filled with water, and furnaces
blown out. Therefore there is bitter distress and starvation, and cries
for relief works, and one meal a day for Board school children, and the
red flag of Socialism is unfurled. All because of these little grains of
wheat.
They talked of bringing artillery, with fevered lips, to roar forth
shrapnel in Trafalgar Square; why not Gatling guns? The artillery did not
come for very shame, but the Guards did, and there were regiments of
infantry in the rear, with glittering bayonets to prod folk into moving
on. All about these little grains of wheat.
These thoughts came into my mind in the winter afternoon at the edge of a
level corn-field, with the copper-sheathed spire of the village church on
my right, the sun going down on the left. The copper did not gleam, it
was dull and brown, no better than discoloured wood, patched with pieces
of later date and another shade of dulness. I wish they would glitter,
some of these steeples or some of our roofs, and so light up the reddish
brown of the elms and the grey lichened oaks. The very rooks are black,
and the starlings and the wintry fieldfares and redwings have no colour
at a distance. They say the metal roofs and domes gleam in Russia, and
even in France, and why not in our rare sunshine? Once now and then you
see a gilded weathercock shine like a day-star as the sun goes down three
miles away, over the dark brown field, where the plough has been going to
and fro through the slow hours. I can see the plough and the horses very
well at three miles, and know what they are doing.
I wish the trees, the elms, would grow tall enough and thick enough to
hide the steeples and towers which stand up so stiff and stark, and bare
and cold, some of them blunted and squab, some of them sharp enough to
impale, with no more shape than a walking-stick, ferrule upwards - every
one of them out of proportion and jarring to the eye. If by good fortune
you can find a spot where you cannot see a steeple or a church tower,
where you can see only fields and woods, you will find it so much more
beautiful, for nature has made it of its kind perfect.
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