Explanation: The scarcity which you have felt would have been a desolating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true filial piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent.
Answer: The quoted lines have been extracted from the celebrated "Speech on Conciliation with America" by Edmund Burke, the great British parliamentarian. Burke here alludes to the importance of America's rapidly increasing agriculture in meeting food scarcity in England.
America has made rapid progress in agriculture over the last few decades. Its agricultural production has increased manifold. Its surplus corn is imported to England to meet the scarcity of food. Burke says that England's persistent shortage of food might end up in a devastating famine had not America fed her with her own surplus production. He here compares America with an obedient child who feeds her old father with sincerity and devotion. The allusion to the story of Cimon and his daughter Xanthippe's charity is also apt in the context. The youthful daughter kept her old condemned father, who was sentenced to death by starvation, alive with her own milk. Burke comments that with similar devotion America is supplying means of sustenance for England. In the lines, he is upholding the importance of America for England. Burke appears to be very poetic here; his use of metaphors is awesome. His comparison of the mother country with an old man and the colony with a child arrests our immediate attention.
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