Where wealth accumulates, and men decay

Covid-19 has taught us who the key workers are. And they are not the people we thought even a few weeks ago.

But then Oliver Goldsmith got there 250 years ago in his poem The Deserted Village:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.