But we buried our youth and
strength and health in those graves, too, and what for? I don't own the
farm that we worked so hard to pay for, and my children won't. That is
what it has all come to. We were rightly punished for our greed, I
suppose. Perhaps no one has a right to own any portion of the earth.
Sometimes I think so, but my husband and I earned this farm, and now the
savings-bank owns it. That seems strange, doesn't it? I suppose you'll say
that the bank paid for it. Well, perhaps so; but the bank didn't earn it.
When I think of that I don't always think that a person who pays for his
breakfast has the best right to a breakfast."
I could see the sophistry of all this, but I had not the heart to point it
out; I felt the pathos of it, too. Mrs. Makely seemed not to see the one
nor to feel the other very distinctly. "Yes, but surely," she said, "if
you give a tramp his breakfast without making him work for it, you must
see that it is encouraging idleness. And idleness is very corrupting--the
sight of it."
"You mean to the country people? Well, they have to stand a good deal of
that. The summer folks that spend four or five months of the year here
don't seem to do anything from morning till night.
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