XV.

Blackberries hanging thick upon the hedge bring to my memory something of long ago.  I had somehow escaped into the country, and on a long walk began to feel mid-day hunger.  The wayside brambles were fruiting; I picked and ate, and ate on, until I had come within sight of an inn where I might have made a meal.  But my hunger was satisfied; I had no need of anything more, and, as I thought of it, a strange feeling of surprise, a sort of bewilderment, came upon me.  What!  Could it be that I had eaten, and eaten sufficiently, without paying?  It struck me as an extraordinary thing.  At that time, my ceaseless preoccupation was how to obtain money to keep myself alive.  Many a day I had suffered hunger because I durst not spend the few coins I possessed; the food I could buy was in any case unsatisfactory, unvaried.  But here Nature had given me a feast, which seemed delicious, and I had eaten all I wanted.  The wonder held me for a long time, and to this day I can recall it, understand it.

I think there could be no better illustration of what it means to be very poor in a great town.  And I am glad to have been through it.  To those days of misery I owe much of the contentment which I now enjoy; not by mere force of contrast, but because I have been better taught than most men the facts which condition our day to day existence.  To the ordinary educated person, freedom from anxiety as to how he shall merely be fed and clothed is a matter of course; questioned, he would admit it to be an agreeable state of things, but it is no more a source of conscious joy to him than physical health to the thoroughly sound man.  For me, were I to live another fifty years, this security would be a delightful surprise renewed with every renewal of day.  I know, as only one with my experience can, all that is involved in the possession of means to live.  The average educated man has never stood alone, utterly alone, just clad and nothing more than that, with the problem before him of wresting his next meal from a world that cares not whether he live or die.  There is no such school of political economy.  Go through that course of lectures, and you will never again become confused as to the meaning of elementary terms in that sorry science.

I understand, far better than most men, what I owe to the labour of others.  This money which I “draw” at the four quarters of the year, in a sense falls to me from heaven; but I know very well that every drachm is sweated from human pores.  Not, thank goodness, with the declared tyranny of basest capitalism; I mean only that it is the product of human labour; perhaps wholesome, but none the less compulsory.  Look far enough, and it means muscular toil, that swinking of the ruder man which supports all the complex structure of our life.  When I think of him thus, the man of the people earns my gratitude.  That it is gratitude from afar, that