r gathered them to the reading round
the work-table, under the eaves in the sunset, would you not be sure to
find that none of them had been overtasked by her, just because none had
been left idle; that everything had been accomplished because all had
been employed; that the kindness of the mistress had aided her presence
of mind, and the slight labour had been entrusted to the weak, and the
formidable to the strong; and that as none had been dishonoured by
inactivity, so none had been broken by toil?

12. Now, the precise counterpart of such a household would be seen in a
nation in which political economy was rightly understood. You complain
of the difficulty of finding work for your men. Depend upon it, the real
difficulty rather is to find men for your work. The serious question for
you is not how many you have to feed, but how much you have to do; it
is our inactivity, not our hunger, that ruins us: let us never fear that
our servants should have a good appetite--our wealth is in their
strength, not in their starvation. Look around this island of yours, and
see what you have to do in it. The sea roars against your harbourless
cliffs--you have to build the breakwater, and dig the port of refuge;
the unclean pestilence ravins in your streets--you have to bring the
full stream from the hills, and to send the free winds through the
thoroughfare; the famine blanches your lips and eats away your
flesh--you have to dig the moor and dry the marsh, to bid the morass
give forth instead of engulfing, and to wring the honey and oil out of
the rock. These things, and thousands such, we have to do, and shall
have to do constantly, on this great farm of ours; for do not suppose
that it is anything else than that. Precisely the same laws of economy
which apply to the cultivation of a farm or an estate, apply to the
cultivation of a province or of an island. Whatever rebuke you would
address to the improvident master of an ill-managed patrimony,
precisely that rebuke we should address to ourselves, so far as we
leave our population in idleness and our country in disorder. What would
you say to the lord of an estate who complained to you of his poverty
and disabilities, and when you pointed out to him that his land was half
of it overrun with weeds, and that his fences were all in ruin, and that
his cattle-sheds were roofless, and his labourers lying under the hedges
faint for want of food, he answered to you that it would ruin him