Page:Carroll - Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.djvu/75

III] does more in the way of school-teaching and cottage-visiting than she would like me to reveal."

"Then she, at least, is not one of the 'idle mouths' one so often meets with among the upper classes. I have sometimes thought they would have a hard time of it, if suddenly called on to give their raison d'être, and to show cause why they should be allowed to live any longer!"

"The whole subject," said Arthur, "of what we may call 'idle mouths' (I mean persons who absorb some of the material wealth of a community——in the form of food, clothes, and so on——without contributing its equivalent in the form of productive labour) is a complicated one, no doubt. I've tried to think it out. And it seemed to me that the simplest form of the problem, to start with, is a community without money, who buy and sell by barter only; and it makes it yet simpler to suppose the food and other things to be capable of keeping for many years without spoiling." "Yours is an excellent plan," I said. "What is your solution of the problem?"