182 My Little Farm 



feeding short cut at the very time in their lives 

 when gradual and natural treatment is essential to 

 their success. 



I will finish with one more of our blindly 

 destructive characteristics. In farming especially, 

 we stand to gain rather than lose by our neigh- 

 bour's prosperity. Poor, he is no use to us ; rich, 

 he could be a better neighbour. Our power to 

 help each other is very great, and we lose all this 

 because we prefer to hurt each other. Many 

 among us would willingly lose to hurt his neighbour 

 rather than gain by helping him ; how many I 

 cannot say, but certainly a large majority of all 

 within my acquaintance. Their neighbour's ill 

 gives them more pleasure than even their own 

 good, which ends in ill all round. We wish to pull 

 each other down, even at the cost of sinking our- 

 selves a little lower. 



In a business like shopkeeping, the savage 

 scramble for contending shares in a fixed and 

 limited total is reasonable enough ; in farming, 

 there is no need for it at all. I cannot lose by 

 showing my neighbour how to get fifty tons of 

 mangolds out of that plot instead of fifteen. I 

 gain by it. Have I not done him a service ? That 

 alone is a pleasure to me, and such a pleasure is a 

 very great gain to me ; for it is in the mind, 

 neither in the field nor in the pocket, that all the 

 really great gains and losses take place. The life 

 of the man who can get no pleasure from his 

 neighbour's good is very pitiful, and the bulk of 

 Connaught is very pitiful, because the bulk of the 



