I 



Time and the Tree 27 



scraper. So in latter days, literature has dis- 

 covered the fruit-farmer: all in due time. In the 

 almanac of letters the fruit-grower has his date. 

 Some people will discover mere respectability 

 in all this ; finding it in a book, they will believe it. 

 This discovery is merely their own. The fruit- 

 grower is a man with a special instinct. Napoleon 

 was an excellent farmer but took too much time 

 for military exercises. Yet his farm — France — 

 is a better farm because of his farming. He ex- 

 hausted the French, but not France. 



Washington was a farmer, and though much 

 absent from his plantation, on military excursions, 

 he neither exhausted the Americans nor Moimt 

 Vernon. And we know that he preferred his farm 

 to the presidency. I have long considered him 

 the greatest of Americans, and much of his great- 

 ness was due to his instinct for farming. Cincin- 

 natus, in the old Roman story, owed all his fame 

 to his reputation as a farmer. Jefferson too, was 

 a farmer, and has recorded his conclusions in one 

 of the most famous of books, his Notes on Virginia: 



Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of 

 God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts he has 

 made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine 

 virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred 

 fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the 

 earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a 

 phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an 

 example. It is the mark set on those, who, not looking up 

 to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the hus- 



