“It is what I should love,” she answered.  “Tell me what to do.”  She was not conscious of the low, vibrating tone in which she spoke.

“I want to talk to them,” he said, “about their stomachs.  I want them to see the need of concentrating upon the food problem:  insisting that it shall be solved.  The other things can follow.”

“There was an old Egyptian chap,” he said, “a governor of one of their provinces, thousands of years before the Pharaohs were ever heard of.  They dug up his tomb a little while ago.  It bore this inscription:  ’In my time no man went hungry.’  I’d rather have that carved upon my gravestone than the boastings of all the robbers and the butchers of history.  Think what it must have meant in that land of drought and famine:  only a narrow strip of river bank where a grain of corn would grow; and that only when old Nile was kind.  If not, your nearest supplies five hundred miles away across the desert, your only means of transport the slow-moving camel.  Your convoy must be guarded against attack, provided with provisions and water for a two months’ journey.  Yet he never failed his people.  Fat year and lean year:  ’In my time no man went hungry.’  And here, to-day, with our steamships and our railways, with the granaries of the world filled to overflowing, one third of our population lives on the border line of want.  In India they die by the roadside.  What’s the good of it all:  your science and your art and your religion!  How can you help men’s souls if their bodies are starving?  A hungry man’s a hungry beast.

“I spent a week at Grimsby, some years ago, organizing a fisherman’s union.  They used to throw the fish back into the sea, tons upon tons of it, that men had risked their lives to catch, that would have fed half London’s poor.  There was a ‘glut’ of it, they said.  The ‘market’ didn’t want it.  Funny, isn’t it, a ‘glut’ of food:  and the kiddies can’t learn their lessons for want of it.  I was talking with a farmer down in Kent.  The plums were rotting on his trees.  There were too many of them:  that was the trouble.  The railway carriage alone would cost him more than he could get for them.  They were too cheap.  So nobody could have them.  It’s the muddle of the thing that makes me mad—­the ghastly muddle-headed way the chief business of the world is managed.  There’s enough food could be grown in this country to feed all the people and then of the fragments each man might gather his ten basketsful.  There’s no miracle needed.  I went into the matter once with Dalroy of the Board of Agriculture.  He’s the best man they’ve got, if they’d only listen to him.  It’s never been organized:  that’s all.  It isn’t the fault of the individual.  It ought not to be left to the individual.  The man who makes a corner in wheat in Chicago and condemns millions to privation—­likely enough, he’s a decent sort of fellow in himself:  a kind husband and father—­would be upset for the day if he saw a child crying for bread.  My dog’s a decent enough little chap, as dogs go, but I don’t let him run my larder.