*$ A MOUNTAIN GARDEN 7 



vegetable and flower seeds. They are free, but 

 you do not know who raised them or whether 

 they are not too old to germinate; and you 

 surely do not wish to bestow your time and 

 labor on a garden for two or three months and 

 then find to your disgust that your flowers are 

 commonplace and your vegetables tough and 

 insipid. 



Government seeds may be good, and doubtless 

 they are sometimes; but you lose confidence 

 in them when you find out something about 

 this political business of free seed distribution. 

 Here is an enlightening paragraph from the 

 New York Evening Post: 



Do our farmers' associations, "resolving" about rail- 

 road rates, know that when the question of the annual 

 appropriation for the distribution of seeds came up this 

 costly year (1920) one of the thirty-odd Congressmen 

 wanted once more to shift this job to the Agricultural 

 Department, where it logically belongs, but a bipartisan 

 majority voted $359,980 (50 per cent more than last 

 year) to keep this graft in the hands of the grafters? 

 This was done secretly in committee of the whole, because 

 no man dared to have his vote recorded. 



You must have miraculous faith in human 

 nature if you think that seeds bought and dis- 

 tributed under such political conditions are 

 worth planting. To be sure, they may be good, 

 but, as I have said, you haven't the faintest 

 idea who grew them or how old they are (and 

 some seeds do not germinate after the second 



