Excerpt from Seed Time and Harvest: Pictures From the Official Records, Wherein Are Seen Labor, Agriculture, and Trade, Sowing the Seed, in Order That Railroads, Banks, and Factories May Reap the Harvest
Place, A Street in Rome. Time, About 490 B. C.
Enter a company of mutinous citizens, with staves, clubs and other weapons.
First citizen. We are accounted poor citizens, the partricians good. What authority surfeits on would relieve us: if they would yield us but the superfluity, while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely; but they think we are too dear: the leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is an inventory to particularize their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. Let us revenge this with our pikes, ere we become rakes: for the gods know I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge.
Enter Menenius Agrippa, friend of Coriolanus.
Menenius. Why, masters, my good friends, mine honest neighbors, will you undo yourselves?
Citizen. We cannot, sir, we are undone already.
Menenius. I tell you, friends, most charitable care
Have the patricians of you. For your wants,
Your suffering in this dearth, you may as well
Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them
Against the Roman state, whose course will on
The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs
Of more strong link asunder than can ever
Appear in your impediment. For the dearth,
The gods, not the patricians, make it, and
Your knees to them, not arms, must help. Alack,
You are transported by calamity
Thither where more attends you, and you slander
The helms o' the state, who care for you like fathers,
When you curse them as enemies.
Citizen. Care for us! True, indeed!
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