The Personal Equation 183 



will. No poorer service could be rendered than to urge 

 them to do otherwise. They are happy in their present 

 environment and would be miserable if they stepped out 

 of it. 



Hence, this message is designed wholly for the coun- 

 try-minded who desire to satisfy their passion for the 

 soil without sacrificing any of the good things they 

 are now getting in their urban experience, including 

 their hold upon the payroll. 



When we shall have put a tithe of the money and 

 genius into the creation of garden cities that we have 

 put into apartment houses, family hotels, and separate 

 houses jammed together on 25-foot lots, there will 

 be a revelation of country-mindedness that will arouse 

 the nation to a sense of duty long neglected, and put 

 a new star of hope in the sky of our common humanity. 



The personal equation is what tells in making success 

 or failure, contentment or discontentment, in the home- 

 in-a-garden, as in other walks of life. Those who have 

 the right feeling and the aptitude — or at least the ca- 

 pacity to acquire it — are the ones to enter upon the 

 adventure. There is such a thing as the home-in-a- 

 garden kink in the brain, just as there is such a thing 

 as the mechanical kink in the brain ; and, in fact, the 

 two are akin, since the element of workmanship enters 

 into both. Decidedly there is a technical side to little- 

 landing, and boundless scope for the growth of profi- 

 ciency, acquired in part by study, but more by ex- 

 perience. The people who do well are those who care; 

 and the people who do best of all are those who sense 

 the deep spiritual significance of the thing, and so make 

 it a sort of religion. In many this is a dormant sense 



