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? - Mencius
The fields were fruitful and starving men moved on the roads. The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew up rachitic. - John Steinbeck