They would not fly beyond the clouds, nor hasten to seek other labors, or other virtues. By cultivating the earth, they will enrich themselves, and they will heap up gold for you also, O, ye rich ones! You cannot deny that all your joys depend on our labor: without it you could not be happy. But what will you do to restrict all these men to cultivating the earth? It is impossible to do so. Ah! pity and deplore the misfortune of a laborer who sows good seed in a sterile soil, and gathers no harvest! It is I who am this laborer; the good seed is the first commandment of God, with its consequences; the sterile soil, those hearts of yours, that amid all the comforts of the world, turn with disgust from the labor that God has imposed on all.
XXV.
I return once more to what I said just now. If God is, above all, present with bread and with the laborer, it seems to me reasonable that we should revere bread as we do God himself, and honor the laborer as the most precious of his creatures in heaven or on the earth. (I do not speak of myself, already so old, who could only join in honoring the others.) To-day the price of bread is fixed at one rouble and forty kopecks the measure, while its real value cannot be understood by the human mind. Once more, it must never be sold, and only in extra-ordinary cases can it be given away. Bread is estimated at one rouble and forty kopecks, and the laborer is quoted at a still lower price. He stands at zero. And yet he is one of the three persons in this one and indivisible trinity which saves us from death.
