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All those great tracts of land, which in your time lay untilled on account of the inroads of the bordering English, or the feuds and discords that raged with perpetual violence within our own distracted kingdom, you would now behold cultivated and smiling with plenty.
The very old, the very lame, and the blind were obliged to stay behind, and whether they were starved, or what became of them, history does not say; but the characters of the great Sir Timothy, and the avaricious tenant, were so infamous, that nobody would work for them by the day, and servants were afraid to engage themselves by the year, lest any unforseen accident should leave them parishioners in a place where they knew they must perish miserably; so that great part of the land lay untilled for some years, which was deemed a just reward for such diabolical proceedings.
Since they had no farm implements, no seeds, no means whatever of cultivating this ground apportioned to their use, it remained untilled while they grew hungrier day by day.
Oh! when I look out here, like a bird from its cage, a captive from his dungeon, and remember what lies behind me, to what I must return to-morrow the over-peopled Babylon of misery and misrule, puffery and covetousness and there before me great countries untilled, uncivilized, unchristianized, crying aloud for man to come and be man indeed, and replenish the earth and subdue it.
It is a land of wide mesas, of wild, rolling pastures and broad, untilled, valley meadows and a man's freedom must be that freedom which is not bounded by the fences of a too weak and timid conventionalism. In this land every man is by divine right his own king; he is his own jury, his own counsel, his own judge, and if it must be his own executioner.
Farms were untilled, enterprise deadened, invention crippled, education neglected; life was of little value; labor was the badge of servility, laziness the very badge and passport of gentility. Despite the most specious half-measures, despite all efforts to galvanize it, to coax life into it, to sting life into it, the nation remained stagnant.
The world's plan of education has mostly been priestly we have striven to inculcate trust and reverence. We have cited authorities and quoted precedents and given examples: it was a matter of memory; while all the time the whole spiritual acreage was left untilled.
And it is astonishing how quickly good land left untilled reverts to its primeval condition, or, in the expressive language of the country, "goes back to bog." This has been shown in many cases.
The perverse dog at last flattened himself down on his stomach, spread-eagled himself on the ground, and stretched his four legs out as stiff as he could. We dragged him over the yard until he raised a pile of dirt and leaves in front of him like a plow in an untilled field. He would not "lead," although we nearly choked him to death trying to teach him.
But if any captain was wary in war, and knew how to discover whatsoever his enemy designed, that captain was Xaintrailles. None the less I hoped in my heart that his secret tidings of the Burgundian onfall had not come through a priest, and namely a cordelier. Dawn found us mounted, and riding at a foot's-pace through the great plain which lies rough and untilled between Guermigny and Lihons.
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