108 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 
servative compared with it. The only thing to be done with 
either the floral or human type is to keep it moving. They 
best serve utility when not allowed to get thoroughly estab- 
lished. Both destroy a large portion of the social fabric when 
an effort is made to uproot them, for their ramifications are so 
complete that they underlie many innocent victims. I rep- 
resent a generous distributor of this unlawful wealth. I be- 
stow not millions—for plants have not evolved to that degree 
of debasement—but bushels of it on young struggling gar- 
deners that need endowment, as I am determined to die poor 
in daisies, heliotrope and hawkbit. Whenever I hear of a new 
opportunity to play the generous benefactor, I unload my 
surplus—never quite able to impoverish myself, however. I 
attach no condition that an equal amount shall be raised by 
the recipient before the gift is forwarded. It is not that helio- 
trope, Calystegia and daisies are not good—nor dollars; it is 
merely a question how much of a burden of plants or dollars 
one can carry without inconvenience and impoverishment in 
other directions. 
The pauper poor, with their irresponsibly prolific families, 
are but the human form of those improvident plants that shed 
their too fertile seed in every direction. If the population is 
restricted in either case to a reasonable limit, where society 
can provide for the children, they become excellent citizens. 
Otherwise they are flung out on the cruel world without suit- 
able provision, and either the mortality is great—Nature’s kind 
and universal way of disposing of a surplus—or both are forced 
to emigrate to find lodging for the ever increasing hordes. My 
orphanages, almshouses and foreign colonies are very shady 
unsanitary spots down by a brook, also the sides of the lane, 
where both diet and shelter are precarious, owing to the fact 
that that corner of the world is a regular slum district, already 
crowded with hungry trees and underbrush looking for work, 
