Page 40 - 《孟子》（一）中·英对照版

?孟
子

hundred mu, and the family of several mouths that
is supported by it shall not suffer from hunger. Let
careful attention be paid to education in schools,
inculcating in it especially the filial and fraternal
duties, and grey-haired men will not be seen upon
the roads, carrying burdens on their backs or on
their heads. It never has been that the ruler of a
state, where such results were seen—persons of
seventy wearing silk and eating flesh, and the black-
haired people suffering neither from hunger nor
cold—did not attain to the royal dignity.

Your dogs and swine eat the food of men, and
you do not make any restrictive arrangements. There
are people dying from famine on the roads, and you
do not issue the stores of your granaries for them.
When people die, you say, ‘It is not owing to me; it
is owing to the year.’ In what does this differ from
stabbing a man and killing him, and then saying—‘It
was not I; it was the weapon?’Let Your Majesty

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